4/27/2008

New era in Anti virus software

This is silent war topic going on the AV vendors. As a person who's work related to this industry I thought of sharing my 2 cents opinion on this.

Few years back working with AV with the signature file updates has been pretty adequate. But the landscape changed dramatically with the rise of the various vulnerabilities coming from web as well than any one expected. So here we are now talking about spyware, malware, browser hijacking, man in the middle attacks, bots, phishing...etc (more to come in da future) So now all the AV vendors has identified protecting Pc's from virus signature files is no longer a reliable solution. So now we've been offered with a new solution called EndPoint Protection. So this time the explanton is we not only need to protect the individal pc's but as well as the endpoints like network ends. In a certain way this makes a pretty sense. Most of the employees are now working mobile and heavily depend on mobile devices like laptops, palmtops..so when they roam around the country, world they can bring pretty nasty vulnerabilities to your network. So this is the place where your first defense should work. In firewall we talk about this as layered security. So we protect the network from the endpoint level so Pc's will be check against the company security polices even before they are allowed to connect to the co-operate network. So the last defense would be the antivirus with various other components integrated.

So my understanding is network administrators and security mangers would give more attention to this and identify why endpoint security is more reliable. So the main quote is "AV is not enough for your company" Many AV vendors has already adopted this technology and come up with various solutions. Symantec, Mcafee, Kaspersky has already entered to this race. So give it a consideration how should you protect your network and doing so save your neck....!!!