RSA to offer Trojan take-down service

EMC's RSA division plans to launch a new service next month that will help financial institutions take down Web sites associated with malicious Trojan Horse software.

The service is planned as an extension to the FraudAction phishing takedown service already offered by RSA, said Louie Gasparini, co-chief technical officer with RSA's Consumer Solutions unit. "We're leveraging the same infrastructure we already have in place... and now we're focusing our attention on how Trojans work," he said.

Gasparini said he expects financial services companies, auction sites, and online merchants to use the service. "It's really allowing the institution to better protect its customers," he said.

With consumers now becoming more wary of phishing attacks, online criminals are increasingly using malicious software to snoop out victim's financial information, Gasparini said. Trojans, which masquerade as legitimate programs in order to trick the victim into downloading them, are often used to log keystrokes and steal sensitive information, he said.

RSA will work with antivirus vendors and Internet Service Providers to identify and block dangerous Trojans and then to shut down the Web sites associated with them.

A select group of customers has been beta testing the service for the past few months, and RSA has already taken down about 170 Trojan-related sites, Gasparini said.