14 DAY TRIAL // Security vendors Sourcefire and Immunet have partnered up to swap technologies behind their antivirus products. The new Windows version of ClamAV, the well-known open source antivirus solution from Sourcefire, integrates with Immunet's cloud for better malware intelligence.
Cloud-based malware detection is seen by many as the natural next step in the evolution of antivirus software. In fact, the concept has already seen significant adoption in the industry, with some of the biggest players already revealing their full or partial implementations.
Advocates of the technology argue that relying on the collective intelligence of an entire community of users makes cloud-based antivirus products more suitable for today's rapidly changing threat landscape. Traditional solutions that rely only on signatures for malware detection are constantly proving incapable of keeping pace with the massive volume of new samples released on a daily basis.
However, by combining ClamAV's heuristic and signature-based scanning engine with the could-based Collective Immunity technology, security researchers from both companies hope to provide more reliable solutions to their respective customers. "The two technologies are naturally complementary. By adding the leading capabilities of ClamAV to the Immunet Cloud, we add an additional layer of protection, enhancing Immunet's breadth and depth of threat coverage," commented Alfred Huger, vice president at Immunet.
"ClamAV is one of the most widely deployed open source anti-malware solutions in the industry, powering numerous security solutions worldwide. The relationship with Immunet takes ClamAV's protection a step further," added Matt Watchinski, Senior Director of the Sourcefire Vulnerability Research Team.
The company estimates that ClamAV for UNIX-based systems, which for a long time was the only officially supported ClamAV version, is integrated into over two million gateway devices. However, this version does not yet benefit from the cloud-based protection.
At the moment, the ClamAV for Windows is solely based on Immunet's technology and therefore requires a connection to the Internet to function properly. Offline scanning will be added with integration of the upcoming ClamAV 0.96 scanning engine, the first build to natively support the Win32 platform in years.
The 32- and 64-bit versions of ClamAV for Windows can be downloaded from our servers.
