Category: Product

AV-Test is not as well-known in the United States as it should be, possibly because the group is located in Germany at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. Andreas Marx, manager of AV-Test, provided test results showing how long it took 23 major anti-virus programs worldwide to come up with new signature files during the past several weeks. The new signature files involved in the test were developed to fight four novel viruses that weren’t being caught by the preventive or “heuristic” techniques of most anti-virus programs. These four new viruses are known as Dumaru.Y, MyDoom.A, Bagle.A and Bagle.B.

AV-Test uses special scripts to check the servers at anti-virus companies every five minutes, looking for new signature files.

H:M Anti-Virus Program
06:51 Kaspersky
08:21 Bitdefender
08:45 Virusbuster
09:08 F-Secure
09:16 F-Prot
09:16 RAV
09:24 AntiVir
10:31 Quickheal
10:52 InoculateIT-CA
11:30 Ikarus
12:00 AVG
12:17 Avast
12:22 Sophos
12:31 Dr. Web
13:06 Trend Micro
13:10 Norman
13:59 Command
14:04 Panda
17:16 Esafe
24:12 A2
26:11 McAfee
27:10 Symantec
29:45 InoculateIT-VET

Although new signatures are sometimes posted very quickly in special cases, many major anti-virus services schedule regular online updates only once or twice a week, AV-Test says. Other providers, such as F-Secure, schedule updates seven times a week, while Kaspersky Labs schedules them 20 times a week, according to AV-Test’s figures.

Kaspersky schedules new signature files the most often — and earned the fastest average response times in AV-Test’s real-time trials, shown above — because the company has a large number of people around the world analyzing viruses and developing cures, Holdsworth says.

More info: http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/columns/executive_tech/article.php/3316511

Integrity 5.0 ensures that endpoint systems — laptops, desktops, and even mobile devices — are meeting security policies established by the IT department before access to the network, either from within the firewall or remotely from outside the perimeter, is allowed. Boasting increased integration with Check Point’s popular line of virtual private networking (VPN) access and firewall products, Integrity 5.0 guarantees that only systems meeting security policies can connect remotely via VPN, said Fred Felman, vice president of marketing for Zone Labs.

“Integrity allows administrators to deploy and manage a very flexible set of alternative rules if a client is out of compliance with policies,” Felman said.

The new centrally-managed policy maker and enforcer also now sports support for security patches and service packs — such as the blizzard of those released by Microsoft — so that endpoint machines are forced to deploy those that administrators think are necessary before the systems connect to the enterprise environment. The new Integrity server software supports Windows 2000 and Windows 2000 Advanced Server, while the Integrity clients run on Windows 95, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0 Workstation, and Windows XP Professional.

More info: http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20040223S0008

The new user-driven features include an integrated patch repository that can automatically collect patch information from Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. as well as Shavlik Technologies LLC, a small patch-management vendor that collects information about patches and provides it in machine-readable format, including dependencies and meta data associated with a patch.

“This product allows you to simulate a patch being installed on an end-point, and you can do end-path analysis,” described Purnima Padmanabhan, director of product management at Marimba of Mountain View, Calif.

The simulator can determine before deployment which patches will install on end-points and which will not, which patches are obsolete; and it will identify patch conflicts and installation order.

Within one shot, you know how many [end-points] are compliant or are not compliant,” Padmanabhan said.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1533017,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594

The machine, which will compete with similar products from rivals EMC and Network Appliance, is designed to help companies preserve information in keeping with a host of new laws such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which are intended to prod companies to adopt better data-handling practices.

This feature helps organizations in situations in which the precise retention period is unknown, IBM said. For example, because mortgages with 30-year terms can be paid off at any time, the retention period for such data could be based on the event of the payoff

Storage specialists Network Appliance and EMC have similar products on the market.

Network Appliance’s SnapLock software is designed to work with the company’s disk storage systems to help organizations satisfy record-retention requirements. The company also allows for tape backup of the data.

EMC sells a storage device called Centera designed to facilitate compliance with regulations. The product offers ease-of-management features and can be expanded to a capacity of multiple petabytes, according to EMC.

Dianne McAdam, an analyst at research firm Data Mobility Group, said one difference between the IBM product and the EMC gear is that EMC’s is designed to keep data on disks, while Big Blue’s allows customers to retain data either on disk or magnetic tape.

In a recent study by investment firm Credit Suisse First Boston, about 77 percent of chief information officers surveyed indicated some level of increased IT spending in 2004 based on regulatory requirements.

http://news.com.com/2100-7341_3-5161264.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=news

Power Tools 4.2 measures the frequency and destinations of e-mails that an organization sends externally and automatically set up a list of “friendly domains.”

The upgrade is an improvement over competitors’ software that use white lists of domains, which require manual updates by IT administrators, officials with the Canadian company said.

Power Tools can be configured to automatically delete identified spam, while forwarding legitimate e-mail for virus checking before going to end-user inboxes.

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20040217S0014

Service quality will decline due to capital and operational cuts at major carriers, accelerating the migration toward Internet-based services.

Cisco added on-board SSL to the CSS appliance, and included valuable back-end SSL multiplexing that enables end-to-end encryption without completely sacrificing the scalability advantages of offloading SSL. Cisco also added URL rewriting, and in 2004 we expect the firm to continue to improve its depth of payload inspection and replacement functionality, which lags the general market.

F5 Networks F5’s recent feature development has been aimed at bridging the gap between the network and application with deep packet inspection (up to 16k beyond the header), SOAP/XML application programming interfaces (APIs), and enhanced rules to filter, switch, persist, and log activities as they pass through the box. This functionality enables a developer to tie application logic to network switching and allows the network load balancer to move up the stack toward more complex application and database load balancing.

Foundry Networks Foundry is widely recognized as being very capable at building scalable Ethernet switching and routing platforms. These enhancements enabled Foundry to gain ground on rival Cisco, but it still falls short of Radware and F5 in application functionality.

Radware was the first to market with link load balancing and has extensive experience with it. Other distinguishing features of the Web Server Director include bandwidth management, multigigabit DoS, and a good management console.

NetScaler NetScaler is an innovative challenger that is gradually converting some key marquee accounts (e.g., Google, MSN) due to its scalability, DoS protection, and server acceleration.

META Group recommends that buyers conduct due diligence into the company’s financials prior to purchasing.

More info: [url=http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/Network_Load_Balancing_Vendor_Update.html?tag=tu.nwblog.6584]http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/Network_Load_Balancing_Vendor_Update.html?tag=tu.nwblog.6584[/url]