as a stand-alone solution or as an extra layer with existing security protections. The company says it offers its product as Web-based software-as-a-service, or under a customer’s control as a virtual appliance in a data center.
Staker, who previously headed Malta-based GFI Software and San Diego’s Websense (NASDAQ: [[ticker:WBSN]]), says he also likes the prospects for generating advertising revenue. “There’s a wild viability, a wild upside, to using advertising for these images,” he says. “Instead of putting up stock photos [for example], users could pick a driver, golf ball, and golf club.”
Confident Technologies says it also offers an alternative to Captcha, the squiggly letters and numbers popularly used to verify whether a user is human (and to block automated log-in attempts used to spam). The company also provides what it calls “out of band” verification that sends a secure, one-time password through a text message or automated call to the pre-registered telephone number for a cell phone. For example, spokeswoman Sarah Needham says, “an online banking website would typically use out-of-band verification as a second layer of security if the consumer is attempting to log-in or make an online transaction from an unrecognized computer, or a computer that has an IP address registered in a suspicious geography, or at a strange time of day.
“If you tried to log in from China in the middle of the night, or if your computer was under the control of a bot that was logging in from a suspicious geography in the middle of the night, or if a hacker knew your online credentials and was trying to log in from a different computer, it would trigger an out-of-band verification step,” Needham says. “An automated call is sent to the phone number that you gave
