New specification-based monitoring approach to catch most sophisticated emerging threats for Windows XP and Vista users
MADISON, Wis., April 1, 2008 /PRNewswire/ — NovaShield, Inc., a leader in advanced anti-malware technology, today launched a free 60-day trial version of its cutting-edge anti-malware product, NovaShield AntiMalware, for both Windows XP and Vista. Developed to detect rapidly morphing and sophisticated malware threats such as drive-by-downloads, Trojans, keyloggers and rootkits, NovaShield’s leading anti-malware technology has been awarded two grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the commercialization of its breakthrough research in PC security and protection.
“Today, the newest strains of malware often slip past traditional anti-virus defenses,” said Dr. Jon Giffin, a noted security researcher and member of the faculty in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “PC users now need advanced anti-malware software to protect them from cybercriminals working to infect and control personal computers and to steal personal information. A threat detection approach that is not reliant upon signatures would help protect these users from emerging forms of malware.”
NovaShield’s specification-based monitoring approach relies upon detecting a program’s malicious behavior rather than relying upon some previously recognized pattern or signature in the malicious program. This ability to monitor the activities of a program and to recognize when these activities match the high level behavior of sophisticated malware enables NovaShield to catch threats that might otherwise avoid detection from current signature-based and anomaly-detection based software.
In January, Google’s Anti-Malware Team reported that one in every 1,000 pages of the World Wide Web contains malicious drive-by-downloads that automatically install and run malware to exploit browsing visitors. Website features such as videos, advertisements and blogs provide new avenues for hackers to hide phishing schemes and malware. Signature-based anti-malware products require a computer to be infected before a signature can be written to prevent against future attacks of the same strain. This often leaves PC users vulnerable to emerging threats during a time known as the window of exposure. In crawling the web sites of over 95,000 suspicious web sites over a period of several months, NovaShield security researches were able to detect hundreds of new threats with NovaShield AntiMalware that were not detected by leading signature-based anti-virus programs. The median time for a vendor to obtain signatures for these threats, i.e. the window of exposure, was at least 19 days. Recent data from a leading anti-virus vendor reports that the median window of exposure for all threats was 55 days in the 1st half of 2007.
The root cause of this wide window of exposure is obvious when looking at recent test results conducted by Av-test.org, a leading organization in the testing and analyzing the range of anti-virus software, which showed a shocking 500 percent increase in malware variants from almost 1 million in 2006 to over 5 million in 2007. Over a five-year window from 2002 to 2007, the number of such variants rose by a factor of 25. This trend is a big problem for a signature-based approach because a signature must be generated for many, if not all, of these variants. A behavior-based approach, on the other hand, can potentially detect the presence of an unlimited number of these variants with the same behavior profile. The inexorable growth in malware variants thus makes a robust behavior-based solution no longer just a nice “add-on,” but a “must-have” feature for better protection and security.
Pricing and Availability
NovaShield AntiMalware 60-day Trial Version for Windows XP and Vista is available for free download from NovaShield’s website at http://www.novashield.com/.
About NovaShield
NovaShield Inc. (http://www.novashield.com/), founded by leading scientists at the University of Wisconsin, develops technology to detect and eliminate the next generation of malware threats on personal computers. Their breakthrough approach rapidly identifies previously unseen malware by using specification-based monitoring, a real time and uniquely effective approach for detecting looming threats. The NovaShield team has developed the most advanced and accurate anti-malware product available to consumers and businesses with the best-in-class ability to find new threats such as drive-by-downloads, trojans, botnets, keyloggers, and rootkits. Funded by two competitive grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and private investors, NovaShield is based in Madison, Wisconsin.
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Source: NovaShield Inc.
CONTACT: Jenna Boller of Page One PR, +1-415-321-2344,
jenna@pageonepr.com, for NovaShield Inc.
Web site: http://www.novashield.com/
