And the Winner is…Drum Roll, please…Marc Allard

First let me thank everyone who participated in our Collective Immunity Contest! We launched the contest on January 12 to promote the value of friends, family and neighbors banding together to protect their PCs from Internet-born viruses and other malware. 

This contest garnered international participation and I’m happy to report that our winner hales from Canada! Ottawa-resident Marc Allard has won 50 one-year subscriptions of Immunet Protect Plus to share with his Personal Online Community and $100 cash reward to line his own pocket.

Congratulations, Marc!

We asked Marc about his impressions of Immunet’s Collective Immunity™ initiative. Here’s what he told us:

“I’ve been the victim of virus attacks in the past and, so far, I just love the service Immunet provides. I’m very excited to be able to offer free upgrades of the paid version to all of my friends, because I really do believe that the secret to fighting PC viruses is to group our efforts.”

Clearly, Marc and Immunet think alike when it comes to PC protection.

Immunet’s Collective Immunity™ technology uses the power of the Internet (the “Cloud”) to create a network protection effect that keeps your PC and the computers of your friends and family safe online from more than 21 million Internet-based threats. When Immunet detects a threat, everyone in the Immunet Community is immediately protected, simply by having Immunet installed.  Each time a virus is blocked on one computer in the Immunet Community ALL other computers are instantly protected from the same virus, increasing the speed and level of virus protection with each new member.  This collaborative approach uses “strength in numbers” that grows smarter with each new community member.  Contrast this to traditional anti-virus software that requires the latest download of anti-virus signatures, which can take days to become available after the threat appears.

Over One Million People Depend on Immunet Protect:  It’s Lightweight, Fast and Compatible with Other Security Software

Immunet Protect Free is today’s most innovative cloud-based anti-viral software for protecting your PC and social network against cyber threats from around the world. Within seconds of downloading it, you gain the protection produced by every other PC in the Immunet Community around the world—now over a million strong, including Vatican City. Even CNET is singing its praises, giving it at 4.5 star rating (out of 5) and saying it provides “…an extra dose of peace of mind” in a June 2010 review.  Immunet Protect is up to 35 times lighter than traditional antivirus solutions, which take up between 100 and 350 megabytes of disk space and causes performance slowdowns. In contrast, Immunet Protect uses only 10 megabytes of space, to keep PCs running at optimal speeds.

Immunet Protect Plus provides everything that Immunet Protect Free provides, plus a host of advanced antivirus capabilities, including enhanced virus removal, the ability to schedule virus scans, offline scanning that protects PCs even when they’re disconnected from the Internet, and more for just $19.95.

Once again, Marc, thanks for taking the Immunet PC Anti-Virus Community Challenge. We’re sure your friends will be thanking you, too!

Immunet Protect now offered in Google Pack

We are really excited to announce that Google started including Immunet Protect as part of Google Pack suite of essential software. What is Google Pack? From their web site:

"Google Pack is a free collection of essential software from Google and other companies. The software in the Google Pack helps you browse the web faster, remove spyware and viruses, organize your photos, and more."

We like to think that Immunet Protect will  be a good new addition to Google Pack. Our cloud and community-based approach to protecting PCs against modern malware attacks is very much in sync with Google's approach to making the internet easier to use.

You can find us in Google Pack at:

http://pack.google.com/intl/en/pack_installer.html

Friends, Family, Neighbors Unite to Fight Digital Virus Pandemic!

Here at Immunet we think a lot about how to protect people against the potential harm to cherished digital photos, memories and personal information stored on PCs belonging to the more than 750,000 moms, dads, kids and other Immunet community members worldwide. Because of this, Immunet Protect is designed to work most effectively with the way in which you interact with your friends, family and others on the Internet. Our approach, called Collective Immunity™, uses the information about a person’s community and the viruses that their community is exposed to in order to provide better protection for that community.  What this means is, your protection against viruses is better the more people that you interact with who are also protected by Immunet Protect.

And to drive home the point we’re sponsoring a Collective Immunity Contest aimed at getting you and your entire Personal Online Community—your neighbors, friends and family members—to band together to protect your PCs with Immunet Protect Free. Think of it in the same way as when your neighbors, school and community work together to prevent a dangerous illness from spreading. Immunet is the inoculation your digital community needs to stop the pandemic of millions of viruses and other nasty stuff infecting the Cloud, poised to strike vulnerable PCs everywhere!

Here’s how it works:

All you have to do is download Immunet Protect Free at http://get.immunet.com and then ask everyone in your personal online community—that’s everyone you Facebook with, Twitter with, email to or chat with—to download it too. During installation of Immunet Protect Free, there is a prompt to Share via Facebook. To enter the contest, select this option and add your name at the beginning of the pre-populated text in the dialog window to be entered instantly into the contest to ….wait for it…

Win up to 50 one-year subscriptions of Immunet Protect Plus …and a $100 cash award.

…for you and your friends. Think of it as a collective online community effort to achieve Collective Immunity! The winner will be announced March 2, 2011 on the Immunet website.

What is Collective Immunity™ and how does it protect PCs better, you ask?

Both are reasonable questions. Let me go back a few years to explain. Remember when desktop computers were mainly used for doing work and using them to communicate was largely limited to sending an email? The web was around but you didn’t spend a lot of time there. In those days, hackers—mainly smart, misguided kids—could wreak havoc on PCs and business networks by attaching a virus to a bogus email. Entire hard drives could be wiped out and networks taken out for hours or days just by opening one of these attachments.

The industry responded, in part, by developing anti-virus software that you installed on your hard drive. Every so often the anti-virus vendor would issue updates with protection for new viruses and other threats like worms and Trojans. That strategy still works, but not quite as well as it used to.

Here’s why:

We’re spending a whole lot more time on the Internet and it’s grown to be huge. We use it as a primary way to keep in touch with our family and friends. We Facebook. We Twitter. We blog. We instant message. Our parents, grandparents and children are doing it too. We shop online. We play games online. And we entertain ourselves online watching Internet TV and movies or YouTube.

All of this is not lost on the cyberpunks who have now grown into full-blown cyber criminals. What used to be pranks have turned into criminal acts aimed at stealing credit card numbers and identities. In other words, it’s big business. These guys are smart and they’re fast at adapting their malicious code to wreak the most havoc. Waiting days for your anti-virus vendor to develop and package new anti-virus signatures can be too late. These threats strike quickly and can mutate before you receive protection.

That’s why you need “real-time” protection to keep your PC safe. That’s what Immunet’s Collective Immunity is all about.

Unlike traditional antivirus products, which reside on PC hard drives, and take between one and 14 days to gather, analyze and deliver updates—often after the threat has mutated, Immunet identifies viruses in real-time and continually delivers antivirus protection via an Internet connection to its community of Immunet Protect users as soon as they’re identified.

Immunet’s Collective Immunity™ technology uses the power of the Internet (the “Cloud”) to create a network protection effect that keeps your PC and the computers of your friends and family safe online from more than 18 million Internet-based threats. Each time a virus is blocked on one computer in the Immunet Community ALL other computers are instantly protected from the same virus, increasing the speed and level of virus protection with each new member. This collaborative approach uses “strength in numbers” that grows smarter with each new community member.

Immunet protects your PC and the PCs of your personal online community — your friends, family and neighbors, who also happen to be the most likely sources of a virus infection. When Immunet detects a threat, everyone in the Immunet Community is immediately protected, simply by having Immunet installed. Contrast this to traditional anti-virus software that requires the latest download of anti-virus signatures, which can take days to become available after the threat appears.

Three-Quarters of a Million People Depend on Immunet Protect:  It’s Lightweight, Fast and Compatible with Other Security Software

Immunet Protect Free is today’s most innovative cloud-based anti-viral software for protecting your PC and social network against cyber threats from around the world. Within seconds of downloading it, you gain the protection produced by every other PC in the Immunet Community around the world—now nearly 750,000 strong, including Vatican City. Even CNET is singing its praises, giving it at 4.5 star rating (out of 5) and saying it provides “…an extra dose of peace of mind” in a June 2010 review.  Immunet Protect is up to 35 times lighter than traditional antivirus solutions, which take up between 100 and 350 megabytes of disk space and causes performance slowdowns. In contrast, Immunet Protect uses only 10 megabytes of space, to keep PCs running at optimal speeds.

Immunet Protect Plus provides everything that Immunet Protect Free provides, plus a host of advanced antivirus capabilities, including enhanced virus removal, the ability to schedule virus scans, offline scanning that protects PCs even when they’re disconnected from the Internet, and more for just $19.95.

Win Protection for Your Personal Online Community — Take the Immunet PC Anti-Virus Community Challenge Today

Immunet Acquired by Sourcefire

As we ring in the New Year, I’m also very happy to announce that Immunet begins an entirely new and exciting stage in our company and product’s life.

Immunet has been acquired by Sourcefire, Inc.  (NASDAQ: FIRE). While this event means that Immunet as a separate company no longer exists, the heart and soul of our great product will endure and continue to grow as a very important and well supported group within Sourcefire.

Over the past 2½ years the team here at Immunet has built an amazing cloud platform to deliver next generation security technologies and raise the bar for AntiVirus protection.  As a result, we’ve built a product that is 35 times smaller than our nearest competitor using an entirely new approach to fight today’s rapidly spreading threats – our Collective Immunity™ technology.  After growing to over 750,000 users in just over a year, we have reached a stage in our company’s life where we needed to put our pedal on the gas and spread Immunet to the entire world.

We're taking a huge step forward today in accelerating our technology, and expanding our market by becoming a part of Sourcefire.  Sourcefire allows us to continue developing our technology as we do now, with a large amount of autonomy, but also exposes us to millions of users who already rely on their products today.  Sourcefire is a great match for us from a technological, cultural, and philosophical standpoint - that was one of the reasons why this acquisition made so much sense. They are a well-respected company with deep roots in security solid products such as Snort, the most well known network Intrusion Prevention System on the market today.

The next year will be very exciting – Sourcefire is committed to fully supporting Immunet products moving forward (Immunet Protect Free and Immunet Protect Plus), and we, as the newly formed Cloud Technology Group, within Sourcefire will be there to do it.  We’ll be the same team, just in a larger company.

We’ll continue to do everything that we can to make Immunet the best AntiVirus product on the market and to make the Internet a safer place.  Our relationship with you, our community members, will not change.  Thanks to all of you who have supported us to date. Your recommendations, concerns, and bug reports have really allowed us to reach this next stage.

Stop The Grinch From Stealing Your Holidays

The stores have been dropping hints now for a few weeks – the holidays are nearly here! Time to get ready! Time to think about what to buy. The children on your list are easy, but what do you get for those who seem to have everything or say they don’t need anything? You contemplate, you worry, you do the math, you fight the crowds, you search for those perfect gifts and you hope you made the right decision. If you’re like me, it just wears you out thinking about it. If there were only an easy answer to the gift giving questions—something that would be a welcomed surprise, original and useful.

Here’s a novel idea:  Superior PC AntiVirus protection that won't slow your computer down.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. “Well, that’s different.” But, admit it, you have to give it an “A” for originality. It’s definitely useful. And it would be a surprise – who would ever expect to receive a gift of AntiVirus software? You have to admit it hits all the big criteria for a great present!

Think about it. How many of your family members and friends have a home PC? And what do they do with it? Surf the Internet, shop online, play games, Facebook, Twitter, watch funny videos, movies or TV shows, keep the family finances, do taxes, store family photos? 

All it takes is for one virus to infect a family PC and everything can be lost:  precious photos, financial records and hard to replace files like your address book. Using email and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, playing online games and even surfing the Net are sources of all sorts of dangerous viruses that can infect one PC and then spread to others. These viruses do Grinchy things ranging from stealing information as you type (keyloggers) or lifting data off your hard drive (Trojans) to locking up your computer to wiping out your hard drive.

And it happens more often than you think, because an estimated 40% to 60% of PCs are completely vulnerable. Most new computers come equipped with a 30- to 90-day trial version of an anti-virus software package. More often than not, when the trial expires it doesn’t get upgraded to the paid version. At that point, the PC becomes completely unprotected. The danger is so prevalent that according Microsoft’s 2010 Security Intelligence Report over 2.2 million PCs in the U.S. are infected by botnet viruses. A botnet is a group of computers infected by a Trojan virus that can be used for spamming and mass credit card fraud, among other things. It can take less than five minutes of time online for a Trojan to take hold of an unprotected computer and use it for illicit activities—and the owners rarely suspect it

Fortunately, Immunet developed a new way to keep personal PCs safe. Immunet’s Collective Immunity™ technology uses the power of the Internet (the “Cloud”) to create a network protection effect that keeps your PC and the computers of your friends and family safe online. Each time a virus is blocked on one computer in the Immunet Community ALL other computers are instantly protected from the same virus, increasing the speed and level of virus protection with each new member. This collaborative approach uses “strength in numbers” that grows smarter with each new community member.

Immunet Protect Free is today’s most innovative cloud-based anti-viral software for protecting your PC and social network against cyber threats from around the world. Within seconds of downloading it, you gain the protection produced by every other PC in the Immunet Community around the world—now nearly 700,000 strong, including Vatican City. Even CNET is singing its praises, giving it at 4.5 star rating (out of 5) and saying it provides “…an extra dose of peace of mind” in a June 2010 review.  Immunet Protect is up to 35 times lighter than traditional antivirus solutions, which take up between 100 and 350 megabytes of disk space and causes performance slowdowns. In contrast, Immunet Protect uses only 10 megabytes of space, to keep PCs running at optimal speeds.

Here’s another important point to consider:  Unlike traditional antivirus products, which reside on PC hard drives, and take between one and 14 days to gather, analyze and deliver updates—often after the threat has mutated, Immunet identifies viruses in real-time and continually delivers antivirus protection via an Internet connection to its community of Immunet Protect users as soon as they’re identified. And because Immunet can work alone or along with other anti-virus software, you don’t have to worry about a conflict when giving it as a gift.

Spread the Gift of PC Protection

For just $19.95, you can surprise your friends and family members with this season’s most original and useful gift:  a one-year subscription of Immunet Protect Plus. It provides everything that Immunet Protect Free provides, plus a host of extra goodies like enhanced virus removal, the ability to schedule virus scans, offline scanning that protects PCs even when they’re disconnected from the Internet, and more. (And you’ll stay well within your budget!) 

To purchase Immunet Protect Plus, click here.

You can then use our gift certificate to give Immunet Protect to your most trusted friends!

Happy Holidays!

Is Your PC Haunted?

The fact is your PC could be haunted by all manner of malicious code from zombies, botnets and worms to viruses, Trojans, spyware and keyloggers—and not just at Halloween. Anyone who’s ever been attacked by any of these vile creatures knows it’s downright frightful. The thought of your PC becoming infected and then infecting those of your family, friends, neighbors and acquaintances is enough to make you scream! Even more horrifying is losing your hard drive and everything on it: family photos, files, your address book—a shocking experience that is a very real possibility without the proper antiviral safeguards.

Then there’s the criminal aspect: Trojans, which are spread by email attachments and bogus Internet downloads, turn PCs into zombie machines, enabling their creators to suck the good stuff out of your computer and pass it on to the bad guys for all manner of mischief. A botnet is a group of connected zombie computers that can be used for spamming and mass credit card fraud, among other things. It can take less than five minutes of time online for a Trojan virus to take hold of an unprotected computer and use it for illicit activities—and the owners rarely suspect it. According Microsoft’s just released Security Intelligence Report over 2.2 million PCs in the U.S. are infected by botnet viruses.

While there are no silver bullets to protect your PC, there is Immunet. Think of it as the magic potion to shield your PC from malevolent cyber tricksters looking to wreak havoc on unsuspecting home computers – and not just yours, but everyone you communicate with via email or over the Internet. Social networking venues like Twitter and Facebook, and online games, are especially fertile breeding grounds for these creepy invaders when people don’t protect their PCs with AntiVirus software.

And here’s a scary thought sure to make you quake in your boots:  According to a recent USA Today article, an estimated 40% to 60% of PCs are completely unprotected. These machines are easy targets for cybercriminals. Infecting them, stealing data and using them to conduct online scams is as easy as sneaking chocolate out of your kid’s Halloween stash. If you’re socializing online with someone who has an unprotected PC that becomes infected, you and all of your friends are likely to be the next victims.

To counter the threat, Immunet developed a new way to keep personal PCs safe. Immunet’s Collective Immunity™ technology uses the power of the Internet (the “Cloud”) to create a network protection effect that keeps your PC and the computers of your friends and family safe online. Each time a virus is blocked on one computer in the Immunet Community ALL other computers are instantly protected from the same virus, increasing the speed and level of virus protection with each new member. This collaborative approach uses “strength in numbers” that grows smarter with each new community member.

Just like you’d never let your child go Trick-or-Treating alone, there’s safety in numbers when it comes to keeping your PC safe. Immunet Protect Free is today’s most innovative cloud-based anti-viral software for protecting your PC and social network against all manner of cyber threats from around the world. Within seconds of downloading it, you gain the protection produced by every other PC in the Immunet Community around the world—now nearly 600,000 strong, including Vatican City.

Unlike traditional antivirus products, which reside on PC hard drives, and take between one and 14 days to gather, analyze and deliver updates—often after the threat has mutated, Immunet identifies viruses in real-time and continually delivers antivirus protection via an Internet connection to its community of Immunet Protect users. Immunet Protect is up to 35 times lighter than traditional antivirus solutions, which take up between 100 and 350 megabytes of disk space and causes performance slowdowns. In contrast, Immunet Protect uses only 10 megabytes of space, to keep your PC running at its optimal speed.

And in the spirit of Cyber Security Awareness Month, we’re offering a 25% discount for anyone who wants to upgrade to Immunet Protect Plus in October. Just enter the promotional code “OCTOBER” at the Immunet Store during check out.

Immunet Protect Plus provides everything that Immunet Protect Free provides, plus a host of extra goodies like enhanced virus removal, the ability to schedule virus scans, offline scanning that protects your PC even when you’re disconnected from the Internet, and more—all without slowing your PC to a sluggish crawl!

Have a Zombie Free Halloween! Be Safe!

99% of people can't watch this video more than 25 seconds

The tag line is enticing.  What type of video could be so awful that most people will be unable to watch it for a mere half a minute? Will I be able to bear it, or will I fall by the wayside like the other 99+% of people have?  On top of that, a couple of my friends on Facebook have mentioned this video to me.  I’ve seen more posts about this video today on Facebook than I have seen about the movie Inception.

These thoughts, among others, are likely to have been going through the minds of millions of Facebook users today when they saw the following status message pop up from one of their friends:



If you follow the link, you will find yourself at this screen:

The picture here is ostensibly what we often call a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).  These types of tests appear in a host of places, typically to ensure that the person at the other end of the Internet connection is indeed a real human being and not some type of automated software program with a nefarious purpose.  A computer program might have a hard time automatically interpreting these instructions and clicking on the appropriate regions of the screen, but it is child’s play for a human.  (Though, as an aside, it does not seem hard to imagine writing a computer program that can actually follow these instructions.)

While these instructions seem straightforward and while you are likely to want to follow them to access such a salacious and possibly disturbing video, you will find that underneath the hood, things are quite different.

Here’s the actual code underneath the “red” button:

If you notice carefully (the highlighted line), clicking on the red button will cause you to share this link with all of your friends.  So, while you might think you are just following instructions to see this video, all of your friends will now be spammed with this content.

Under the blue button, a similar story unfolds:

Click on it, and suddenly you will join the throngs of Facebook users who unknowingly have “Liked” this page. 

In either case, as you might imagine, there really is no video behind the digital curtain.  Instead, this whole ruse is a rather mischievous way of propagating  a scam over Facebook.  What makes this type of scam all the more powerful is that it leverages social context.  You are far more likely to click the link and follow the instructions since it is at the behest of a friend on Facebook.   This type of social propagation of malicious activity is largely why we designed Immunet Protect to provide community-based protection.  Sometimes the biggest threats to your online safety are far closer than you might think.

Sometimes these scams are the work of a prankster looking for notoriety.  In other instances, they form a launch pad for some type of cybercriminal activity looking to ensnare victims and ultimately profit off of them.  In either case, it is best to stay far away and ensure that your computer is protected from the latest threats.

We’ll continue to monitor the situation to see how the die will be cast.

Immunet By The Map

As the Immunet community approaches almost 400,000 members we wanted to come up with a cool way to show where all of you are located and the impact that you are having on making the Internet just a little bit safer.  What better way than to show it on a map?

As many of you will recall, data mining is one of Immunet's strengths, and one of the approaches that sets us apart from our competitors.  Due to the way that Immunet was built, we have the ability to examine global threat data very easily and make this presentable at a very high level.

Adam O'Donnell (the smart PhD who helped to build Immunet) and I overlayed this data onto a map and what you see below is a geographical representation of viruses that Immunet BLOCKED in just a one week period at the beginning of July.

It's pretty amazing to us when we can see how many threats Immunet is blocking around the world.  It should definitely make all of us feel like we're doing something good in being part of this community.  Immunet just keeps getting stronger as more of you join and that will only continue to make it more effective.

Keep in mind that this represents only where threats were blocked.  The Immunet community is much larger than that and of course not all of you see viruses every day!

Click on the below image for a larger version

Immunet Protect 2.0 now available!

Today marks a huge milestone for the team here at Immunet.  As Immunet reaches its two year anniversary I’m extremely excited to announce the launch of Immunet Protect 2.0.  The Immunet team has been hard at work for the past 9 months, building the next version of our free, fast and lightweight cloud-based antivirus product.  We originally launched Immunet Protect 1.0 last August and since then have had over 275,000 people install our product.  Thank you everyone for your support!  Here is what you will see today:

1. A re-launch of the Immunet web site which is now live at http://www.immunet.com.  Nobody would argue that our site needed a facelift as our company and membership has grown!


2. The release of Immunet Protect 2.0 Free, our free product now includes many of the features that you would expect in a full fledged antivirus product, including full system scan, scheduled scan, context menu scan, and gaming mode.  It also contains a first for the antivirus industry – a built in Community feature that allows you to protect others and share the product with your most trusted contacts. 
   
   Immunet Protect's integrated Community feature allows members to extend virus protection to their most trusted friends and family members.  Once shared, members can view the protection status with those contacts who have also installed the product, giving them confidence when sharing links, photos, and other information online. Community members can view the total protective power of their network, indicating how many viruses they have collectively blocked; we call this their Protection Factor.
   
   


3. The release of Immunet Protect 2.0 Plus, an upgrade from our Free product for users who are looking for complete stand alone protection.  Plus provides advanced protection capabilities including rootkit detection, offline scanning and sophisticated threat removal.  The product starts at $19.95 for a one computer, one year license; a very competitive price relative to the cost of other antivirus products!

As part of our launch, CNET has covered Immunet on cnet.com with a review from Seth Rosenblatt.  In addition, CNET’s download.com will be offering Immunet Protect Plus 2.0 for free through TrialPay when you take advantage of a third party offer!

Upgrade your version of Immunet Protect 2.0 today and join in the effort to protect others!

The desktop security battle is just beginning

Jeremiah Grossman from Whitehat Security posted an interesting Blog on Thursday entitled ‘Ceding the desktop security battle, almost the war’ which was followed by an article from Dennis Fisher on ThreatPost, ‘Have We Lost the Desktop Security Battle?’.

Both posts draw the same conclusion (with Dennis really hitting it home) – AntiVirus vendors have lost and virus authors have won.  Since this debate has been percolating in the security space for well over a decade now, let’s look at some real facts on how well today’s leading AntiVirus vendors are doing.

To do this, let’s look at one of the few impartial industry reviews that actually measures how well we are all doing.  The best measure for this is AV Comparatives, run by Andreas Clementi in Germany.  His review, the Proactive / restrospective test is designed to measure a product’s detection rate on new, previously unseen threats.  AntiVirus vendors all do very well on known threats, regularly achieving over 99% detection.  Known viruses, however, are shared by vendors across the industry and everyone has them, including the reviewers; so these numbers come as no surprise.  It is how well vendors do on unseen threats that REALLY matters and ultimately dictates how protected Consumers are as they browse the Internet each day.  This is what the retrospective test measures.

Andreas’ last retrospective review was released in November of 2009 and can be obtained here (PDF document).  Note that Immunet has not participated in the review (our product is still in beta as we improve our own detection capabilities).  The below picture pretty much sums it up:



As we can see, average proactive detection rates hover at 50% or less, including those of the two market leaders.  There is a caveat to this test – products that use execution based detection (such as emulation or behavioral monitoring) are not able to benefit from them in this test. 

This is a stark reminder as to what a typical Consumer should expect from their AntiVirus product:

A less than 50% chance of being protected when they encounter a new threat. 

As a result, Financial Institutions (as Jeremiah discusses) are more than justified in assuming that all Consumers are compromised, and in accepting transactions despite this.

Despite these numbers, I would argue that the AntiVirus industry has not ceded the battle, nor has it lost it, but it is struggling to maintain high efficacy rates in the face of a growing number of threats.  The traditional approaches to this problem are not working.  We need game changing technologies to make a dent in this problem, since the status quo just won’t do. 

I remain convinced that by using the latest technologies in cloud computing, collective intelligence, data mining and machine learning, we can make a big leap forward from where we are today and turn the table on these threats.  The AntiVirus problem has turned into a data management and timing problem.  It is about how much temporal data about files you can collect, and how quickly you can process that data in order to make a basic decision on its disposition; ultimately a YES or NO decision.  These concepts are exactly what we are working on here at Immunet and we have certainly not given up.  

Rather than seeing the war as being lost, we at Immunet believe that the battle is just beginning.  We are just starting to see the benefits from these game changing technologies.  We are building technologies that will have the ability to be far more effective than what has been built before us, and we are all devoting our lives to this fight in the here and now.