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Purewire is a web security company that serves business users. But the company is announcing a new consumer service that helps users screen through bad web sites or check the identities of people they don’t know.
Dubbed Purewire Trust, the service deals with three threats: potentially malicious people, unsafe places on the web, and unsafe things [...]

Purewire is a web security company that serves business users. But the company is announcing a new consumer service that helps users screen through bad web sites or check the identities of people they don’t know.

Dubbed Purewire Trust, the service deals with three threats: potentially malicious people, unsafe places on the web, and unsafe things such as strange Java applications. With Purewire Trust, you simply type in someone’s email address and you can collect a bunch of information about them.

With the email search, you can find out if an eBay user has a good reputation, or who your kids are befriending online, or if a job applicant is being honest, said Paul Judge, chief technology officer and co-founder (pictured right) of the Atlanta-based company. The search results show the person’s reputation and what social networks they have joined, such as Facebook or MySpace. It then lists the pages so that you can view them, if the settings have not been set for privacy.

With places, you can check to see if web sites have a bad record in terms of cyber security, where their actual servers are hosted, and other details such as how many seconds it takes to load a site. If you ran a search on Kazaa, for instance, you’d find that the site isn’t trustworthy, consumes a lot of bandwidth, and is a frequent source of malware. It will tell a security administrator which port the site uses and how the site can be blocked by blocking the port.

The company was founded in November, 2007. It raised $1 million from its co-founders, raised $3 million from friends and family, and it is now raising a $10 million round. The company has 40 employees. At the moment, the company makes money only from its web security business. It is preparing to launch a beta of the consumer site today.

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