The Austin, Texas-based company’s first product was Confidence Online Enterprise Edition, launched in 2002 to provide behavioral analysis on endpoints seeking access to corporate networks over an SSL VPN. We send down a small-footprint ActiveX module that scans the computer and reports back to say whether it’s OK to get on the VPN, and if not, the network admin can disable or quarantine it, depending on their policy, explained CEO J. Peter Selda.
We don’t address the attack vectors but rather the suspicious behavior, using scoring algorithms to look for things like keystroke logging, Trojans, Unicode and so on, he added. Once installed, the agent can reside on the endpoint in cache, or can be erased at the end of the session.
In 2003 Whole launched the Portal Edition of Confidence Online, currently in use by companies such as online brokerage Ameritrade, and last year it added Webcaller ID, a product designed to find phishing sites in real time for companies such as eBay, where some 400,000 customers have it on their toolbar.
On the back of that work, Selda went on, Whole moved to offer anti-phishing as a service. We’re working with Microsoft, eBay, PayPal and Visa on an aggregation site called Phish Report Network, collecting data and running block lists.
Whole is privately held, having completed a first round of funding for $10m in August 2002 and currently raising a similar amount. As for its future roadmap, Selda sees the potential for OEM deals. It already has one with eBay, and without naming any names, he cited companies who are already building firewalls, AV and anti-spam into their products and might be interested in including our technology for compliance checking as potential partners. We have a great opportunity to work more closely with companies like Microsoft, he hypopthesized.
With regard to pricing, Whole charges per user for Enterprise, with the price for small installations being around $30 per head, decreasing to around $15 for big companies. Licences are perpetual, with an annual maintenance fee. For Portal Edition, it charges by chunks of users, with a site receiving 30,000 users paying between $3,000 and $5,000 a month.
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