With the proliferation of security threats, no single solution is good enough and multiple layers of protection are necessary in terms of software and hardware.
This is the view of Jan G"utter, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) public relations manager for the EMEA region.
"Malicious code is often able to bypass traditional firewalls and anti-virus software, but AMD has enabled PC users to add another layer of security by implementing enhanced virus protection (EVP) technology," he says.
"EVP is a hardware feature built into AMD`s Athlon and Opteron processors, which together with Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Linux derivatives, protects PCs against the most common and dangerous threats in the form of worms and Trojan horses," explains G"utter.
EVP works by preventing buffer overflows, which is the technique most worms and Trojan horses use to get malicious code into memory and executed.
"EVP enables the processor to identify whether code should be executed or not by using a single-bit flag, effectively making the malicious code inert," says G"utter. "This is possible only when AMD`s EVP technology is used in combination with Microsoft`s SP2 or all Linux distributions with the latest version of the kernel."
Processor-level virus protection will also be available to users of Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 when it is released.
"Successful virus protection depends on having as many lines of defence as possible, which means implementing processor-level protection to deal with the most common and malicious attacks that may slip through firewalls and anti-virus software," concludes G"utter.
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