Under cover: local company provides e-commerce anonymity.

• Author: Sutherland, Spencer
• Position: Techknowledge

What would happen to your company if your computers were hacked? What would you lose--passwords? Customer lists? Credit card info?

Just a few weeks back, another virus swept through Utah computers, this time targeting web-based email accounts like Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail. While there are worse things than finding that someone has hacked your email and sent Viagra ads to every person in your contact list, it is a very tangible reminder of just how quickly your personal information can be used against you.

A study by Javelin Research and Strategy found that more than 11 million Americans were victims of identity theft in 2009, resulting in $54 billion in losses by businesses and consumers. While there are plenty of products available to detect compromised data--whether it's software that catches viruses after they've entered your computer or credit monitoring services that alert you when unauthorized activity has already occurred--the market has been short on tools to prevent the problem.

Online Armor

Salt Lake City-based technology company Kemesa (a name built from the words "keeps me safe") recently introduced Shop Shield, a product aimed at not only keeping email accounts safe from hackers, phishers and spam, but more importantly, protecting persona! data before it is compromised.

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"The only way that fraud and identity theft is going to stop is when the information isn't available to steal," says Kemesa CEO Mike Keough. "What we provide consumers is a masked identity when they're buying online. Their real information is never out there, so there's nothing to steal. That's really the fundamental difference between us and all of the other solutions out there"

Countless websites require personal information, ranging from a simple username to credit card numbers and home addresses. When you offer up this information, it is stored on the site's databases. Fraud and identity theft are often caused by employees or others who have access to those databases and lose, sell or steal the information.

Shop Shield masks personal identity, replacing your real payment and identity information with anonymous data that can't be used by identity thieves or traced to you.

When setting up an account, Shop Shield customers provide their real data to Kemesa. This information is saved on Kemesa's servers, but is never sent over the Internet in any form. Once the registration process is complete, users simply download a small Shop Shield...