Dynamically generated whitelists help stop hackers

Whitelists have traditionally been used as a way of limiting what users can do, but they're time consuming to maintain and keep up to date.

Florida-based Terra Privacy is addressing this with a system where destinations are continually inserted and removed from the whitelist in real-time, in concert with the user's activities.

Hacker Deterrent Pro's system provides effective protection against browser-injected trojans. It uses a Transient Whitelist that only contains the addresses of open webpages and their declared additional connections. All other browser traffic remains blocked. This means browser-injected trojans are blocked from connecting to their command and control servers.

"Incredibly, even the most popular cybersecurity products leave this gaping hole wide open -- marking their customers easy prey for hackers to exploit," says Michael Wood, president and founder of Terra Privacy. "When it comes to stopping hackers, nothing’s more effective than whitelists. Now users finally have a 100 percent whitelisting solution to protect their digital lives from the constant barrage of hacking attacks."

It guards against non-browser trojans too by ensuring that applications like Word and Photoshop can only talk to their maker's sites and no others. It also uses DNS whitelisting to protect operating system traffic. This would have blocked the recent Trojan T9000, which injected itself into the explorer.exe file to use it to covertly connect to a hacker’s server.

Hacker Deterrent Pro is due for commercial release on July 17th, but a free Windows beta version is available to download now from the Terra Privacy site.

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