News and Updates

Earlier last month, an executive at Symantec, the maker of the widely distributed Norton series of anti-virus products, said the anti-virus product “is dead”. His statement was made to the Wall Street Journal, and was mainly about the prospects for anti-virus products themselves. The important part of the story is why Symantec feels this way.

Anti-virus product makers, like Symantec, are changing their fundamental thinking about the nature of viruses and malware. In the past, their approach has been to presume the systems being protected (i.e. your system) were essentially secure and the threats came mainly from brute-force, frontal attacks by the cyber criminals. Programs, like Norton, relied mainly on maintaining a thorough list of the many threats and flagging their presence on (or attempting to penetrate) a system. This approach may have served well through the ‘early days’ connectivity, but now Symantec estimates their own product is only catching 45% of cyber-attacks.

The new thinking about security does not begin with the presumption that the systems are secure. The new starting point is that every system is vulnerable and hackers are attempting to actively exploit those vulnerabilities. This approach also works better with the prevalence of day-zero attacks; attacks that only become known upon the widespread, simultaneous activation of sleeper code.

This new thinking shifts focus to scanning; actively and constantly searching a system for signs of improper activity and malicious code.

Sound Technology Services is now offering Webroot, a leader of the next generation scanning security products, as a monthly software license, to all of our managed service clients. One unique characteristic of Webroot is that it takes a ‘snapshot’ of your system code, and then continually compares subsequent snapshots against the original. If the product detects malicious code, or if your system suffers an attack, Webroot can replace any corrupted code with the safe, earlier snapshot version.

For additional comparison information between Webroot vs other popular traditional Anti-Virus products, go here.