The Essurance System

 

The metaSwarm Essurance system provides personal and commercial information assurance. It promotes Internet trust by providing certainty—certainty that a message or website originated from the authorized sender entity, certainty that it is delivered or posted unaltered, and certainty that it is a message or website of an appropriate content type.  In addition, it provides a proactive mechanism for discovering brand hijacking attempts.

The Essurance system also provides information about a message or website that enables a user, whether an individual or a corporation, to make informed decisions with respect to that message or website.

metaSwarm believes that the only effective way to build Internet trust is through automation.  The originators of spam, fraudulent (phishing) messages, fraudulent websites (pharms), and brand hijackers use automation to reach millions of people cheaply.  Only a small percentage of people need to fall victim to spam and phishing attacks for such attacks to be profitable, and thereby encourage increasing numbers of attacks. 

For the same reason that Internet abuse is so effective that it continues to grow, so will the metaSwarm Essurance system be effective against it—that reason is automation.

Essurance Automated Protection

With its ground breaking technologies, the MetaSwarm Essurance system has begun to build a suite of products that effectively protect users of all levels from the Internet abuse that exists today—and that may exist tomorrow.

  • Validation. The Essurance system provides a lightweight, easily implemented, and elegant solution against the modern plague of phishing and pharming.  Corporate and government clients can make validated mass mailings, and they can customize the mailings for individual users using a single validation block.  Individual users know that a client's message or website is authentic by the color of a tool bar icon: Green, the message or website is valid; red, it is not valid.

    Essurance validation functions are algorithmic, so they provide automated protection that can stop phishing and pharming attacks at their first appearance.
     
  • Message management. The Essurance system provides user interfaces that allow different types of users to specify different levels of monitoring and filtering.  Parents can specify message and website content types that are undesirable for their children, and they can specify whether to block access to them or to be notified of such access.  Corporations can do the same for their employees with respect to inappropriate message or website content.  Corporations can also specify monitoring of internal systems to ensure that no one is misusing or abusing corporate resources.  Of course, all users can specify what they consider to be spam and specify whether they want to delete or quarantine spam messages.

    The Essurance system is language-independent, so it can process messages in any language.  Also, because Essurance monitoring and filtering processes are algorithmic, no humans are involved in any message classification or categorization—so message privacy is maintained.

    Once users set their monitoring and filtering preferences, the Essurance system automatically processes messages and monitors websites accordingly. 
     
  • Analysis. The Essurance system includes data mining and reporting tools with fine-grained targeting mechanisms for directed discovery.  These tools have user interfaces that may be customized for particular applications.  For example, the Essurance Diogenes user interface is the means for specifying video or audio file parameters for discovering torrent file distributions.  Other interfaces allow analysts to set parameters for the discovery of likely fake websites and phishing domains.  

    The analysis tools can be automated to search continually, for example, for trademark infringements, phishing attacks, or for a specific torrent file distribution.  They also provide automated notification that enable human resources to follow up on particular search results.