Cloudmark Stops Viruses Before They're Even Named
"Zero-hour" Solution Faster by Hours or Days at Protecting Service Provider Networks and Subscribers
BRUSSELS, June 26, 2006 – Cloudmark, the proven leader in real-time messaging security, announced today that it has discovered and stopped three new viruses days before other major anti-virus companies addressed them. Cloudmark Authority Zero-Hour Anti-Virus stopped the viruses within 30 seconds to ten minutes of their first sighting, leveraging recently announced "zero-hour" virus detection capabilities that have made the company consistently fastest in blocking new attacks.
An open source solution and a small AV company stopped these particular viruses 47 minutes and 24 hours after Cloudmark, while brand name vendors did not document efforts until four to five days later. The viruses, all variants of the Brepibot and IRCBot strains, were stopped by Cloudmark's unique anti-virus fingerprinting algorithms that capture invariant aspects of malware, enabling fingerprints to cover multiple mutations. Cloudmark Authority Zero Hour AV isolates and identifies the core virus machine code in the message body and compressed attachments to preempt permutations.
"Our system consistently blocks viruses well before they are named or even detected by other anti-virus companies," says Vipul Ved Prakash, founder and chief scientist of Cloudmark. "The combination of speed advantages inherent in our global threat detection network and our automated back-end processing makes our solution extremely fast and accurate at stopping threats at the service provider edge. Because we rapidly stop threats without having to manually intervene with written rules and signature distribution, the naming process is irrelevant to Cloudmark."
Ved Prakash predicts a rise in mobile viruses with a higher speed of propagation than Internet viruses as these pervasive networks have dramatically increased and expanded the number of possible vulnerable targets. With the potential to reach epidemic proportions, the speed of detection and blocking is becoming even more critical for service providers globally.
How it works
Viruses have become one of the greatest threats to service provider networks as dissolving borders mean customers can become infected despite traditional security measures. The introduction of bot-nets and zombies, and burgeoning subscriber address books that help rapidly propagate a virus, make the immediacy of virus detection vital to maintaining network security and to avoid blacklisting by other service provider networks. Cloudmark Authority Zero-Hour Anti-Virus (ZHAV) accurately identifies and stops viruses and worms within moments of their first appearance in the network.
Millions of discerning users in the Cloudmark Collaborative Security Network (CCSN) provide real-time feedback on spam, phishing, and virus attacks, which enables Cloudmark to block the latest threats within moments of attack origin. Reports from trusted users are corroborated in real time to provide accurate and "unspoofable" data. The data collection, analysis, and update cycle is fully automated to ensure the fastest possible response time, supported by our unique fingerprinting algorithms.
Cloudmark Authority ZHAV is an optional service available on Cloudmark's Authority secure messaging platform, or is available as a stand-alone solution for service providers.
About Cloudmark
Cloudmark builds messaging security software that protects communications service provider networks and their subscribers against the widest range of messaging threats. Only Cloudmark Security Platform™ delivers instant security and control across diverse messaging environments, enabling communications service providers to create a safe user experience, protect revenue and safeguard their brand, while streamlining infrastructure and reducing operational costs. Cloudmark's patented solutions protect more than 120 tier-one customers worldwide, including AT&T, Verizon, Swisscom, Comcast, Cox and NTT.