Prevx - Moo Cow Mentality

Watch Out Spyware Developers, The Herd Might Trample You To Death!

PRWEB - January 22, 2007 - Prevx announced that Yankee Group, a leader in the Anti-Malware research industry, announced that Anti-Virus is dead! Yankee Group analysts have examined the current state of signature-based and behavior based security performance. They concluded that anti-virus and anti-spyware vendors are aware that they are not making the grade in protecting users.

Prevx is the leading vendor providing “herd intelligence features”, tens of thousands of Prevx nodes are collecting unique malware variants each month, which is an order of magnitude greater than McAfee collects. Preyx finds Rootkit 10 days before MacAfee and Symantec according to this release.

The Yankee Group coined the term “herd behavior” to describe software that leverages collective data gathering capabilities from multiple computers in order to develop intelligence against malware. Each computer relays information about programs back to a central computer classified good, bad, or unknown to the hub that analyses the data and provides the run time behavior.

As the other computers attempt to run one of these programs, they benefit immediately from the analysis and are told of the programs previous herd identity. Herd intelligence increases as the herd gets larger because more computers create a larger net to capture malware, and the herd is immunized against the threat.

“The Yankee Group is the first analysis firm to rightly identify what we've been saying for months: the anti-virus and anti-spyware vendors are taking longer and longer to identify and then provide signatures for the new virus and malware outbreaks,” said Prevx CEO, Mel Morris. “Because of our ability to recognize threats to our community early on, Prevx is able to provide protection days and sometimes weeks ahead of the incumbent vendors. It's fantastic that this advantage is recognized.”

The Web 2.0 Take

I visited the Yankee Group web site to verify their comments in regard to Anti-Virus programs being dead, and the actual comment referred to Anti-Virus as we know it being essentially dead by 2009. I do not find this hard to believe any more than I do believing clickable banner ads will be gone.

From a personal prospective, my current version of Norton Anti Virus is totally inefficient at finding many of the new generation of malicious software. The definitions update regularly, but to be honest not nearly fast enough to keep up with those created. I use Spynomore as an adware-spyware utility, and to be honest it actually works faster and more efficiently than any of the “store bought” versions I have had. Believe me, like most of you, I have utilized everything over the years from AdawareSE, to the MicrosoftBeta that was out a few years back, and there is a new freeware version that I have not used yet. Most of these programs work effectively for a period, but then are swamped by the number of programs created to bypass them. I am no guru of security software in any case, but I think most people fall into this category, as most people working on the web just want things that work.  

The complexity and number of malicious threats to the personal PC mirror the overall threat to the web in that unwanted constituents are constantly attempting forcible access to users. I do not expect large companies like McAfee, Symantec and Microsoft to just lie down and die off. Smaller companies often grow out of a great demand, and this is certainly true for little companies like Illysoft who makes Spynomore and Prevx and their interesting new process. 

Many of these companies are in their infancy, but are responsive to the market, and are often cheap or free answers to pesky problems. The Prevx concept of “herd intelligence” is a very interesting one and it sounds awfully collective to me, and I mean collective as in Web 2.0. It is pretty obvious that collective solutions will be the trend in so many aspects of the next web applications. I hope this new brand of “moo cow intelligence” can keep junk off of my computer, and in the end it is what is effective for the individual that counts.  

Graphic acknowledgment: Moo Cow courtesy www.pp3moo.com