As they did with PestPatrol, which the two started in 2000, then sold to CA in 2004, Thompson and partner Bob Bales hope to strike gold by focusing on an area that major security vendors are overlooking.

"We spent two years creating the spyware market...Antispyware was much harder to sell than this," said Bales, who recalled the difficulty of convincing customers not to believe assurances from antivirus vendors that their technology spotted and blocked spyware threats when they didn't.

But if "spyware" was a name that consumers and IT buyers could latch on to, Bales and Thompson admit that they're not quite sure how to brand SocketShield's protection.

"Risk window protection" is one option, said Bales, who noted the recent conundrum that IT managers were placed in when exploit code for a previously unknown flaw in Windows processing of Windows Metafile (WMF) format files was released on the Internet prior to a patch from Microsoft.

"It's another layer of protection. You don't want to have to (use) a third party patch, but what's a user to do?"