Category: Product

“It’s designed to be complementary to anti-virus and internet security products,” said Ed Kim, director of product management in Symantec’s Consumer Division.

Kim noted Symantec’s Norton products already have some behavioral detection capabilities. Kim said Symantec detected a 29 percent increase in active bots in the second half of 2006 versus the first half of 2006, and the total number of active bots detected was greater than 6 million.

Earlier this year, Mi5 Networks added technology to its Webgate appliance to help organizations detect botnet activity inside their networks and combat malware in Web traffic.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2161088,00.asp

“The Internet threat landscape is now characterized by highly sophisticated, multi-stage threats aimed primarily at financial gain,” said Arthur Wong, senior vice president, Symantec Security Response and Managed Services.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=129402&f_src=darkreading_section_297

Antivirus and anti-spyware packages typically are unable to catch or protect client machines from advanced botnet infections — signature-based technology can’t keep up with botnets that are constantly reinventing themselves.

Ed Kim, director of product management for Symantec, says the company’s new software is a stand-alone package that adds another layer of protection and works with existing AV products either from Symantec or other vendors. “Other behavioral [technologies] use emulation and create a secure sandbox where they allow the threat to run, but that tends to be resource-intensive…

Symantec recently reported that there were over 6 million active bots during the last six months of 2006, a nearly 30 percent increase from the first half of the year.

Rob Enderle, principal with the Enderle Group, says the Symantec product is the only one he’s aware of that can “maintain a high hit rate” on constantly evolving and obfuscating bots.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=129169&WT.svl=news1_1

Although Hamlet is a step forward, antivirus vendors like Symantec are playing catch-up in the fight against malware writers, who are increasingly evading detection with a large number of low-circulation variants of their code, said Andrew Jaquith, an analyst with Yankee Group Inc. “Most of the AV labs are like fishing boats with a drift net,” he added.

Symantec competitor McAfee Inc. is planning to announce a rival product to Hamlet next week relating to the company’s “Total Protection for Enterprise with ePolicy Orchestrator security management software,” a McAfee spokesman said Thursday.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9023958&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1

Watchfire technology will also complement existing IBM Tivoli identity, access and compliance management software offerings and ISS by extending security and compliance testing as an integrated element of the application development life cycle.

“Security breaches and lack of compliance with industry and government regulations can topple business integrity and customer trust,” said Danny Sabbah, general manager of IBM Rational software, in a statement.

“IBM’s purchase of Watchfire capitalizes on an important trend in the security software market: inherently secure products,” said Allan Krans, an analyst at Technology Business Research, in an e-mail.

http://ct.enews.eweek.com/rd/cts?d=186-6697-49-642-521895-722981-0-0-0-1

“What we consistently hear from customers is that they have a lot of pains … and a lot of problems that are not currently addressed by business security products that are out there on the market,” Brown said.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2141902,00.asp?kc=EWWHNEMNL060707EOAD