PC Magazine Reviews Authentium SafeCentral

PC Magazine just published an excellent review of Authentium SafeCentral.


Our security features all worked exactly as advertised and the reviewer had many positive things to say about the enhanced security SafeCentral offers online consumers - especially when it comes to online banking transactions.

The only negatives were lack of a password manager, lack of support for Firefox antiphishing, and slight slowness in rendering pages. All of these feature requests/issues have already been addressed for our new release.

The review focused on three main areas: phishing/spoofing, keylogging and screen-stealing, and DNS (URL lookup) security.

With respect to our antiphishing capabilities, one of the things I liked about the review was that the reviewer understood the need for a systematic, real-time approach to preventing phishing. Here's what he said about our abilities in that area:

"If you always visit your sensitive sites by launching them within SafeCentral, there's almost no chance you'll be taken in by a phishing scam."

He also tested our secure DNS lookup capabilities by hacking his test system HOSTS file, and found that we prevent that kind of DNS poisoning.

"I added a line to make requests for www.pcmag.com go to a different site. IE and Firefox were totally fooled, but the SafeCentral browser brushed aside my amateur hacking and went directly to PC Magazine's site."

Excellent! That is exactly what is supposed to happen - poisoning of the local HOSTS file is one of the easiest hacks to pull off, and our patent-pending TSX library (now part of SafeCentral) does a great job of preventing this.

On the subject of sneaky key-loggers and screen-stealers, the reviewer used a keylogger that's "sneakier than most" (his words) and again compared us to IE and Firefox (check out the slide show on PC Mag's site for screen shots of this attempt):

"The keylogger totally captured everything I typed in IE and Firefox. It saved screenshots, it recorded data from the clipboard, and it even tracked what URLs I visited in IE. But it didn't get a single byte of information from the SafeCentral session. I tried several other keyloggers with the same result. Good job!"

The reviewer noted at the end of the review that we could do with some improvements in speed (already addressed), password manager support (also already addressed), and support for the Firefox antiphishing technology (included in the latest build).

The complete text of the review, including screenshots of SafeCentral, can be found by going to PC Mag's site, buying the magazine, or clicking here.

If you'd like to download SafeCentral for free, please go here.