ComputerWorld.in

Domain protection services from Truedomain

Start-up Truedomain today made its debut with services aimed at protecting legitimate domain names used by businesses from fraud and abuse, especially when these domain names are used in attempted phishing attacks.

“Our goal is to stop e-mail-borne phishing attacks,” says Andrew Steele, co-founder and chief operating officer of Truedomain. The Menlo Park, Calif., company is headed by CEO Robert Pickup and backed by $1.2 million in funding from angel investors. Its services are designed to monitor or block e-mail sent out under false pretenses by attackers who exploit the domain names of real businesses to try to trick e-mail recipients.

The start-up says it can help large and small businesses guard the legit use of their domain names in e-mail by leveraging technology based on the Internet Engineering Task Force standards called Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) and Sender Policy Framework (SPF), among other techniques.

Crypto-key-based DKIM has been implemented on most of the major message transfer agent (MTA) software platforms, Steele says, and plug-ins are also available. When businesses activate DKIM support on their MTA, Truedomain’s services can inspect and authenticate e-mail to ensure the domain name is being legitimately used.

“We have two services, Trueinsight for monitoring and TrueProtect to stop and block,” Steele says. “You provide us with a list of domains you own. We use accreditation to assure you are who you say you are.”

Truedomain says it can monitor or block Internet-based e-mail based on network filtering it has set up in close integration with Internet e-mail providers, which Truedomain declines to disclose. Truedomain, which says its pricing could run as low as $10 per month for a small business to about $30,000 for a large business, based on volume, did not disclose its customers.

Steele acknowledges that blocking e-mail does carry the risk of false positives, but the firm shows customers what has been monitored or blocked. Truedomain competes with another start-up, eCert, as well as various other types of e-mail phishing filtering capabilities from a number of providers, including McAfee and Symantec.