Sophos strengthens endpoint and DP offering 13 June, 2010 By Mark Cox

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Today more than ever, proactive detection technologies like Host Intrusion Prevention System (HIPS) and cloud-based malware lookups are now critical to staying ahead of the escalating threat landscape. In fact, Sophos now analyzes more than 50,000 new malware samples daily.

However, within the IT security market, adoption rates of HIPS technologies have been serially low. According to Forrester Research, approximately 6 percent of companies in North America ranging from 20 to 1,000 users currently use HIPS technology and only 8 percent plan to implement HIPS technology within the next 12 months.

"The security industry has long had behavioral anti-virus and HIPS, but false positives, complexity, and cost of ownership have historically prevented widespread use," said Joshua Corman, research director, enterprise security practice at The 451 Group. "The realities of Advanced Persistent Threats and Adaptive Persistent Adversaries require vendors also adapt by investing in, maturing, and enabling better use of advanced detection capabilities. We're pleased to see Sophos adapting to meet these challenges."

Three new protection technologies have been built into the Sophos Endpoint Security and Data Protection 9.5 agent to stop emerging threats from both inside and outside the corporate network.

Sophos Live URL Filtering prevents real-time access to URLs that have been identified as hosting malware based upon an URL database hosted by SophosLabs. This database contains more than 11 million malicious URLS and is growing by 20,000-40,000 each day.

Sophos Live Anti-Virus stops previously unseen threats faster by instantly checking suspicious files against an extensive in-the-cloud database of known good and bad reputation data. A response is received within milliseconds allowing or blocking known good and bad executables.

Sophos Runtime Behavior Detection combines multiple detection techniques and compares results to a database of existing profiles. Behavioral Genotype protection examines files before they execute and new Runtime Behavior Detection examines files as they execute. By using these techniques in concert, Sophos can more accurately proactively identify malware in order to alert users and automatically resolve the issue.

"Sophos's philosophy has long been to offer advanced security protection while reducing the security-related challenges IT administrators face," said Rainer Gawlick, chief marketing officer at Sophos. "The latest combination of technologies introduced in Sophos Endpoint Security and Data Protection 9.5 will address many web-based threats and targeted attacks -- a top concern among all businesses today -- without adding any additional overhead for the customer."

Sophos Endpoint Security and Data Protection 9.5 now covers virtualization by supporting Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware's vSphere operating system. And it comes equipped with enhanced Tamper Protection that prevents users -- be it intentional or unintentional  from uninstalling or disabling security features such as anti-virus, client firewall, and updating on their computer.