Arthur W. Coviello Jr., CEO, RSA Security

Arthur W. Coviello Jr

Some years ago, a salesman from a home-security company came to my house with a scrapbook of newspaper stories chronicling local robberies. Does RSA have a scrapbook?

That's a good analogy for what we've been doing with our consumer-facing initiative. The fact is, the Internet is a crime-ridden neighborhood. We could give you quite a number of cases of how fraud is perpetrated. Unfortunately it's not one isolated instance--there's actually an ecosystem for fraud. You have the guys that design the methodologies for gathering the information and the forms of malware--the insidious software that gets on your computer. Eventually the information is passed on to the criminal elements who go ahead and perpetrate the attack.

You've begun talking a lot about RSA's consumer products, yet you don't actually sell anything directly to people in their homes who are, say, surfing the Web or buying something on eBay. In what way are you serving consumers?

We sell to consumer-facing organizations. So, let's say you're a bank with 10 million online banking customers. How sure can you be that all of those customers have up-to-date operating systems, up-to-date firewalls, personal firewalls, up-to-date antivirus, up-to-date anti-spyware? The odds are pretty minuscule, right? Our products are designed to help the banks help the consumers stop the fraud and stop the identity theft.