Startup service proxies Web, email to purge malware

08.06.2015
Startup Menlo Security is offering a proxy service designed to take the risk out of Web traffic and email by proxying them and delivering just a rendering of the content.

When Isolation Platform is available in a few months it will initially support Web traffic, and later this year will expand to include email and any attachments or links it contains, says the company's CEO Amir Ben-Efraim.

To enable the service, customers divert their Web traffic to the proxy where any executables are run in isolation and only the presentation layer of the traffic is forwarded to the endpoint itself, so no malicious code on a site reaches the end-user's machine. Upstream traffic such as mouse clicks and keystrokes are executed in an isolated browser also in the proxy.

Any code is executed in a container, and the container is destroyed when the user switches links.

The technology will be offered as a service but also as a platform that can be deployed in an enterprise.

No client software is needed and the platform supports Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android operating systems. It also supports Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari and FireFox browsers.

Isolation Platform can be used in tandem with existing Web security gateways that allow certain sites but block others. The platform can be invoked to handle traffic to and from sites that don't fall into either the "allow" or "block" categories in the gateways without altering the gateways themselves, Menlo Security says.

The technology behind Isolation Platform came from patent-pending research at the University of California at Berkeley. It is called Adaptive Clientless Rendering to deliver non-executable copies of user sessions. Ben-Efraim and co-founder and Chief Product Officer Poornima DeBolle founders stepped in to market the technology.

The company is announcing $25 million in Series B venture funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, General Catalyst, Osage University Partners and Engineering Capital. Series A funding totaled $10.5 million.

(www.networkworld.com)

Tim Greene

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