TrustedSource
Encyclopedia
TrustedSource is an Internet reputation system
originally developed by CipherTrust
and now owned by McAfee
. It provides reputation scores for Internet identities, such as IP addresses, URLs, domains, and email/web content.
Reputation data and content categories, as well as global email, web and other network traffic patterns observed by TrustedSource ecosystem, for any IP address, domain, or URL can be checked from the TrustedSource.org portal site
TrustedSource works by analyzing in real-time traffic patterns from email, web and network data flows from McAfee's global set of security appliances and hosted services, as well as those of partners like F5 Networks
. Working off that data stream, it applies data mining and analysis techniques, such as Support Vector Machine
, Random forest
, and Term-Frequency Inverse-Document Frequency (TFIDF) classifiers to determine the degree of maliciousness and security risk associated with each Internet identity, as well as perform content categorization.
The numeric scores that result from that analysis are then combined with local filtering policies of devices and services that utilize TrustedSource to make an accept/deny/traffic shape types of decisions on the network connections associated with those Internet identities.
Internet reputation systems like TrustedSource are useful to effectively block network-based attacks sent over email, web and other protocols. They benefit from the global sensor network reporting attack patterns in real-time and the intensive behavioral analysis is distributed across a world-wide network of systems instead of unnecessarily utilizing processing power of local security devices. Those systems have also been effective at tracking and monitoring botnets, such as the infamous Storm worm
.
Reputation system
A reputation system computes and publishes reputation scores for a set of objects within a community or domain, based on a collection of opinions that other entities hold about the objects...
originally developed by CipherTrust
Ciphertrust
CipherTrust was an anti-spam email software company based in Alpharetta, GA , although they had offices around the world. Since August 2006 it is part of Secure Computing Corp, which was acquired by McAfee in 2008. The company was co-founded by Jay Chaudhry and Lawrence Hughes...
and now owned by McAfee
McAfee
McAfee, Inc. is a computer security company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, USA. It markets software and services to home users, businesses and the public sector. On August 19, 2010, electronics company Intel agreed to purchase McAfee for $7.68 billion...
. It provides reputation scores for Internet identities, such as IP addresses, URLs, domains, and email/web content.
Reputation data and content categories, as well as global email, web and other network traffic patterns observed by TrustedSource ecosystem, for any IP address, domain, or URL can be checked from the TrustedSource.org portal site
TrustedSource works by analyzing in real-time traffic patterns from email, web and network data flows from McAfee's global set of security appliances and hosted services, as well as those of partners like F5 Networks
F5 Networks
F5 Networks, Inc. is a networking appliances company. It is headquartered in Seattle, Washington and has development and marketing offices worldwide. It originally manufactured and sold some of the very first load balancing products...
. Working off that data stream, it applies data mining and analysis techniques, such as Support Vector Machine
Support vector machine
A support vector machine is a concept in statistics and computer science for a set of related supervised learning methods that analyze data and recognize patterns, used for classification and regression analysis...
, Random forest
Random forest
Random forest is an ensemble classifier that consists of many decision trees and outputs the class that is the mode of the class's output by individual trees. The algorithm for inducing a random forest was developed by Leo Breiman and Adele Cutler, and "Random Forests" is their trademark...
, and Term-Frequency Inverse-Document Frequency (TFIDF) classifiers to determine the degree of maliciousness and security risk associated with each Internet identity, as well as perform content categorization.
The numeric scores that result from that analysis are then combined with local filtering policies of devices and services that utilize TrustedSource to make an accept/deny/traffic shape types of decisions on the network connections associated with those Internet identities.
Internet reputation systems like TrustedSource are useful to effectively block network-based attacks sent over email, web and other protocols. They benefit from the global sensor network reporting attack patterns in real-time and the intensive behavioral analysis is distributed across a world-wide network of systems instead of unnecessarily utilizing processing power of local security devices. Those systems have also been effective at tracking and monitoring botnets, such as the infamous Storm worm
Storm Worm
The Storm Worm is a backdoor Trojan horse that affects computers using Microsoft operating systems, discovered on January 17, 2007...
.