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Trusteer claims that:

  • Trusteer Rapport verifies that you are really connected to the genuine website as opposed to a fake website created by criminals. Surprisingly, it is not trivial to reach a genuine website when you type the website address into your web browser.
  • Once verification is complete, Trusteer Rapport locks down communication between your computer and the protected website. This prevents criminals from hijacking your online connection with the bank.
  • Trusteer Rapport protects your computer and Internet connection by creating a tunnel for safe communication with your bank or enterprise, preventing criminals from using malware to steal your log-in data and tamper with financial transactions or information exchanges.

Doesn't HTTPS do all of this for you? It seems to me that Trusteer adds another layer of encryption to supported (mostly banking) websites, is that correct? Ignoring the other stuff that it claims to do, is it worthwhile?

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  • I believe it tries various client-side obfuscations, so if you have malware on your computer, it will try to confuse it. I expect it's a bit like anti-virus - works well against known malware, but patchy against new malware.
    – paj28
    Commented Sep 25, 2015 at 13:21
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    I find it "trivial to reach a genuine website when [I] type the website address into [my] web browser". Any other outcome seems like either rather a lot of work or a failed router.
    – symcbean
    Commented Sep 25, 2015 at 15:04
  • Related video that you may be interested in: youtube.com/watch?v=EimZQgt7WPg
    – SilverlightFox
    Commented Sep 26, 2015 at 11:33
  • I'm also interested in this question but there seems very little info. Another angle is if your av and browser are up to date what can it realistically prevent?
    – Codek
    Commented Mar 7, 2016 at 20:39

1 Answer 1

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Https actually doesn't offer the functionality that Trusteer provides. Trusteer has some very useful tricks to help protect you and your bank including:

  • low level hook in display driver which prevents screen scraping for the data you input to your banking website
  • validation that the website you think you are at is the one you are at
  • risk rating your online activity

And quite a few others including malware obfuscation as @paj mentioned. The main impact on the customer is that it really helps prevent an attacker compromising your machine with something like zeus getting all your banking details.

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  • But isn't all of this futile ? This is at best security by obscurity, but won't protect against an attacker compromising the machine and knowing that Trusteer is running on it, so his malware is designed to also hook into the Trusteer client software and steal secrets from there.
    – André Borie
    Commented Nov 26, 2015 at 15:09
  • @Rory: So it's basically something the Warden anti-cheating software?
    – StackzOfZtuff
    Commented Nov 26, 2015 at 15:13
  • No - the hooks are low enough level it's very tricky to compromise (and the reboot may be a bit of a giveaway as well) - it is definitely not security by obscurity
    – Rory Alsop ♦
    Commented Nov 26, 2015 at 15:16

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