Saturday, August 22, 2009

Immunet - Antivirus Cloud Computing


Immunet, a startup by Symantec senior execs take Antivirus to the cloud. Immunet attempts to aggregate the results and "opinions" of threats from people using this service. This means, if Bob gets an infection from Saudi Arabia, Immunet alongside your antivirus will then update everyone in this Immunet community about the threat in realtime and get protected from this threat.
They also plan to protect social networking and other communities (probably Twitter, etc..)
Interesting concept. Could Computing Antivirus.

In summary, this is like every single immunet user would then be a possible contributor to protect all other immunet users in realtime.
Checkout their narrative:
Immunet Protect is free, light weight, cloud based Anti-Virus software which uses new approaches to provide malware protection. It is designed to work alongside Symantec, AVG and Mcafee to provide significantly improved detection rates in those products. You can also install it alone. Immunet works by providing its own fast and light layer of cloud based virus detection on top of your existing Anti-Virus product. Once you have Immunet installed it ties you into the Immunet Cloud and allows you to build communities of friends and family. When Immunet Protect detects a threat on your system it automatically makes available protections for it to everyone in your community and to the global community protecting them instantly.
Checkout and download. It doesn’t work on my Windows 7 X64 RTM tho :(. So i had to put it on my XP32 running AVG. Perfect!
Currently, this product works better with those three AV products. I am using Kaspersky + Microsoft Security Essentials Beta, so probably i wont benefit much but probably some security information when a bug/security threat is detected on Windows. (not sure..shall try).
Requirements
Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or later
* 300MHz or faster processor
* 256MB of RAM
* 10 MB of available hard disk space
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic/Home Premium
* Supports 32-bit platforms only at this time
* Must meet the minimum Windows Vista operating system requirements
Windows 7 (RC)
* Supports 32-bit platforms only at this time
* Must meet the minimum Windows 7 (RC) operating system requirements
Required for all installations:
* A working Internet connection

http://www.immunet.com
Note, this product is a pre-release i.e. BETA, so use with discretion.
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Above: Number of people online and threats it can clean!!!, not bad.
INTERESTING. After about 20 minutes into writing this, the protection increases by 2!!!!!…SUPER COOL. There were no updates and downloads of threat patterns. Realtime, hell yeah!
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If i click the threat meter..
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nsDialogs.dll is apparenly “safe”
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Settings and such.
To participate, you need to register. Without registering you wont be able to “help” others :)
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Click on register and go get a new account at www.immunet.com. Then immediately sign in and you should be able to see like below;
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Join the cloud? Let us know the experiences.

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