On Wednesday, Eva Chen, CEO and co-founder of Trend Micro, unveiled a new vision for her company that includes "in-the-cloud" malware analysis.
Unlike the computer viruses of twenty years ago which were slow to evolve and infected thousands of systems worldwide, malware today evolves rapidly and infects relatively few systems, creating thousands of new variants each day.
Chen admits that traditional signature-based antivirus may seem a bit out-dated, but argues that pattern matching is still faster than running a full heuristic check of each new malware specimen. Her answer is to throw all the unknown samples up into the cloud for deeper and faster pattern recognition.
For the last few years, Trend Micro has been building robust servers around the world, enabling it to offer more and more Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions to its medium business customers.
Now Trend Micro is planning to include its the "in-the-cloud" network service to in two new suites for enterprises, and may in the future incorporate some of the technology in its home and small business offerings.
With faster Internet connections available worldwide, Chen argues it's faster to do a suspected malware look it up in the cloud than to initiate and execute a sandbox heuristic environment on the desktop. This takes only milliseconds versus the one to two seconds for each sandbox inspection, and over several thousand samples, the time savings add up. Also, all unknown samples could be gathered from around the world, and new signatures could be sent out worldwide.
Chen envisions a 15-minute turnaround from discovery to mitigation of each new malware detected.
On Wednesday, Trend Micro announced two enterprise suites. A Threat Discovery Suite (due in Q3 2008) to find internal security threats on a network, and a Threat Mitigation Suite (due in Q4 2008) to provide analysis and policy review to protect against future threats.
This article was first published as a blog on CNET News.com.
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