Symantec mutates product range

By Leon Engelbrecht for Symantec

Johannesburg, 09 Jul 2007

Security products vendor Symantec has taken a leaf from malware and has "mutated" its product range to better beat the threat its customers face. It will be available to existing and new customers from September - at the same price as existing offerings.

Expanding on the company's future vision for protection against malware, Security 2.0, Symantec Africa regional director Patrick Evans says the company has moved away from a bouquet approach to a single product interface.

Security 2.0 also takes Symantec anti-virus protection from the traditional signature-based approach to the heuristic. The former relied on a registry of known virus identities and worked well in the era before the arrival of mutating malware. Since then, heuristic identification has become fashionable with many new vendors offering this technology.

Project Hamlet

Evans says the product offering, codenamed Project Hamlet, will hit the market under the names Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0 and Symantec Network Access Control 11.0. Both combine anti-virus with threat prevention in a single agent, protecting laptops, desktops and servers. It will use proactive technology that automatically analyses application behaviours and network communications to detect and actively block attacks.

Evans says customers will be provided with integrated anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, host and network-based intrusion prevention solutions, as well as application and device control compacted into a single answer that is easy to install and manage.

"Symantec Endpoint Protection resets the bar for end-point security, reducing overhead, time and costs so customers can efficiently manage security and gain confidence that corporate assets and business are protected," Evans says.

Inclusion by acquisition

Evans adds the offering includes technology acquired from Sygate, Whole Security and Veritas. "This provides operational efficiencies and gives customers a best of breed, yet fully-integrated solution that works across platforms and is supported by a single vendor," Evans says.

Included is deep-scanning technology from Veritas to find and remove rootkits which often evade detection. Also built-in is a device control that allows managers to restrict access to devices such as USB memory keys and backup drives in accordance with designated security policies, mitigating the risk of data loss.

"Hamlet" is also backed by Symantec's Global Intelligence Network with eight Symantec Security Response Centres, four Symantec Security Operations Centres, and more than 40 000 sensors deployed in 180 countries.

The company's products are already on 120 million computers, Evans says, adding that existing customers can expect to seamlessly upgrade their systems during routine uplinks with Symantec.