News: "Flashlight" to help Banks analyse online frauds

Security  vendor Trusteer's latest product will allow banks to remotely investigate their customers' computers if it is suspected the PC has been hacked. The service, called Flashlight, is designed to enable banks' security experts to quickly identify what types of malicious software programs customers are encountering in order to build better defenses, said Mickey Boodaei, Trusteer's CEO.

Now if a bank wants to see if a customer's computer is infected, the computer usually has to be either physically taken to a lab or the hard disk has to be copied, he said. Flashlight detects malicious software programs on the computer and can send a report along with a copy of the suspicious program, Boodaei said. "If they find a new piece of malware they haven't seen before on their customer's computer, this malware comes to us, we reverse engineer it and find out about its capabilities," Boodaei said.

The scenario under which Flashlight would be used is if a customer calls a bank to check on a possible fraud. The fraud investigation team would ask the person to install Flashlight, which can detect if the browser has been previously tampered with. The customer would be asked to send a log report, which can then be analyzed while the customer is on the phone, Boodaei said.

Flashlight can also send other data, such as details of a PC's operating system, version number of applications and whether antivirus software was up-to-date at the time of the infection.

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