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.