Cloudmark Stops Viruses Before They're Even Named

Cloudmark, the proven leader in real-timemessaging security, announced today that it has discovered and stoppedthree new viruses days before other major anti-virus companies addressedthem. Cloudmark Authority Zero-Hour Anti-Virus stopped the viruses within30 seconds to ten minutes of their first sighting, leveraging recentlyannounced "zero-hour" virus detection capabilities that have made thecompany consistently fastest in blocking new attacks.

An open source solution and a small AV company stopped these particularviruses 47 minutes and 24 hours after Cloudmark, while brand name vendorsdid not document efforts until four to five days later. The viruses, allvariants of the Brepibot and IRCBot strains, were stopped by Cloudmark'szero-hour AV technology. Cloudmark's unique fingerprinting algorithmsidentify malicious components of a polymorphic virus such that everymutation leads to the same fingerprint and is automatically blocked.Cloudmark Authority Zero Hour AV isolates and identifies the core virusmachine code in the message body and compressed attachments to preemptpermutations.

"Our system consistently blocks viruses well before they are named or evendetected by other anti-virus companies," says Vipul Ved Prakash, founderand chief scientist of Cloudmark. "The combination of speed advantagesinherent in our global threat detection network and our automated back-endprocessing makes our solution extremely fast and accurate at stoppingthreats at the service provider edge. Because we rapidly stop threatswithout having to manually intervene with written rules and signaturedistribution, the naming process is irrelevant to Cloudmark."

Ved Prakash predicts a rise in mobile viruses with a higher speed ofpropagation than Internet viruses as these pervasive networks havedramatically increased and expanded the number of possible vulnerabletargets. With the potential to reach epidemic proportions, the speed ofdetection and blocking is becoming even more critical for service providersglobally.

How it works

Viruses have become one of the greatest threats to service providernetworks as dissolving borders mean customers can become infected despitetraditional security measures. The introduction of bot-nets and zombies,and burgeoning subscriber address books that help rapidly propagate avirus, make the immediacy of virus detection vital to maintaining networksecurity and to avoid blacklisting by other service provider networks.Cloudmark Authority Zero-Hour Anti-Virus (ZHAV) accurately identifies andstops viruses and worms within moments of their first appearance in thenetwork.

Millions of discerning users in the Cloudmark Collaborative SecurityNetwork (CCSN) provide real-time feedback on spam, phishing, and virusattacks, which enables Cloudmark to block the latest threats within momentsof attack origin. Reports from trusted users are corroborated in real timeto provide accurate and "unspoofable" data. The data collection, analysis,and update cycle is fully automated to ensure the fastest possible responsetime, supported by our unique fingerprinting algorithms.

Cloudmark Authority ZHAV is an optional service available on Cloudmark'sAuthority secure messaging platform, or is available as a stand-alonesolution for service providers.

About Cloudmark

Founded in 2001, Cloudmark Inc. delivers the industry's fastest and mostaccurate spam, phishing and virus detection solutions. The Cloudmarkmethodology leverages an optimized combination of automation, humanintervention and real-time reporting by millions of trusted and rated usersin more than 160 countries. Used by service providers, enterprises anddesktop users worldwide, Cloudmark's award-winning solutions are marketeddirect and through partners worldwide. A privately held,San Francisco-based company, Cloudmark sits on the board of directors ofthe Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, and the steering committee of theAnti-Phishing Working Group. For more information, visit www.cloudmark.com.

Media ContactBrenda RopoulosEmail Contact+1-510-414-6772

SOURCE:  Cloudmark, Inc.

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