This may be today's hottest topic. The FBI estimates that identity theft and identity fraud are the fastest rising crimes in the United States. So, it is reasonable to expect that organizations experience many of the same problems on a somewhat greater scale. This is especially true where consumers and companies interact in sensitive areas. An example of this would be banks. What makes defense difficult is that although the bank is involved, the compromise is likely to be at the user's browser.

Trusteer has a business strategy of addressing the user through the organizations with which they interact. The technical proposition is simple: identify relevant data, such as a bank transaction, and don't allow anything to touch the data or the browser during the transaction, validate the banking site before allowing a connection from the user's browser to avoid phishing attacks, and encrypt the data and protect the encryption from compromise.

If you do all of these things, you don't need to worry about identifying and responding to specific pieces of malware, and zero-day attacks become far less of a concern. Trusteer provides a set of cloud-based services for the bank or other destination so that users can access their accounts or shop securely and any attempts to compromise the user's safety are intercepted, blocked and analyzed.

Trusteer has taken an innovative approach to our number one criminal activity and made its solution available through initiatives with banks. The banks provide one end of the pipe and the users provide the other with help from their banks. I found this to be a very creative way to reach a very large and largely naïve consumer market.

Combined with cloud services, the Trusteer model works very well as a marketing tool and very well as an identity protection/fraud prevention tool. It is notable that this combination includes technology, market strategy, identification of a target market (consumers) and a much more manageable helper market (banks).

For the importance of the problem, we created a new sub-category this year. For the creative way it addresses both the technology and the go-to-market strategy, we name Trusteer our first innovator in this new grouping.

AT A GLANCE

Flagship product: Rapport

Vendor: Trusteer

Cost: $50,000 per year (for the bank)

Innovation: Identifying the number one crime in the United States and finding a unique way to address it and ditribute their solution to a tough market

Greatest strength: Creativity, both at the technical level and the business level