Anti-Virus Protection Breakthrough?

Today, anti-virus software solutions are based on methods and approaches which hackers are trying to bypass altogether.

Virus writers are constantly re-inventing new ways and methods to infect and spread their malicious code, and as a research study funded by HP showed two years ago, "... viruses spread faster than anti-virus patches can be distributed."

Photo credit: George Crux

Imagine anti-virus software that is a few hundred kilobytes in size, needs no yearly subscription, and that protects mobile phones, PDAs, iPods, PCs, Linux boxes and Macs not only from known viruses but also from future epidemics of trojans and other malware that is yet to be invented.

Yes, it may sound too good to be true, but that is indeed what an Indian software company based in Madras claims to have achieved.

 

 

The company is called Sanrasoft and its new anti-virus software will be available commercially in the Western world starting in April 2006. For now, it will be instead available only to Indian customers and immediately after to the larger Asian region.

Once these markets will have provided good positive feedback to these initial release the software will be released in the US market and internationally.

According to UPI though, the new breakthrough anti-virus technology realized by Sanrasoft is now available only for Windows-based PCs, while a handheld version is already under development. Handhelp, Linux and Mac versions are expected by late fall of this year.

The new anti-virus technology is based on behaviour of possible malicious code and protects from known viruses and from any unknown malicious codes (malware) including trojans, worms, spyware and keyloggers.

The key breakthrough is that since this anti-virus technology protects a device from present and future viruses by utilizing a different approach to identify digital intrusions, it removes completely the need for purchasing anti-virus software that needs to be continuously updated.

Rudra, now two years in the making, appears to utilize a heuristic approach that is based on a set of loose rules and probabilities to identify malicious code and which is in turn based on key preventive feature which takes a snapshot of the device to be protected in complete detail before any infection has occurred and then continues to monitor and scan the system for any suspect changes.

"New files, changes in configuration, changes in system control files and changes in critical application program files are all evaluated for potential threats. Any change in the system state that represents a potential threat is immediately acted upon."

To achieve all this, it is obviously critical fro Rudra, to find a system that is till pristine and uninfected. To achieve this it is critical that systems that will want to utilize this new anti-virus technology be totally clean before installing Rudra.

In this light Rudra suggests specific approaches and methods to clean-up your system before protecting it with Rudra.

Clean-up tools to ensure that your system is virus-free:

• Microsoft Virus removal tool
  http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/viruses/Virus.mspx


• How to make your system clean
  http://www.ik-cs.com/got-a-virus.htm
• Microsoft malware removal tool
  http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/viruses/malware.mspx
• Virus removal tools
  http://www.ik-cs.com/got-a-virus.htm
• Removal Instructions & Tools
  http://www.claymania.com/removal-tools.html

Existing anti-virus software typically utilizes a Signature Database to identify viruses and other malicious code. Such signature is basically a binary string that is unique to each virus and the signature-based database technology focuses on identifying any malicious code by continuously monitoring whether a string matching the ones available in its database has entered the system being protected.

Unfortunately, this is effective only when the virus is already known, identified and profiled. Otherwise how can its signature be known?

More recent heuristic technology goes a step further to identify virus files based on past behavior. Here too, the probability of success is limited by whether the virus is "known" or "unknown".

Rudra, instead, takes a completely different approach to virus protection. Rudra stops malicious code in its tracks by monitoring the system and comparing it to its original pristine, secure state, and intervening when new executable code enters it.

Rudra does have some weak points, as its software technology stops viruses in the tracks by scanning for any unknown new executable software code showing up in the monitored system. Such approach may trigger more than one false alarm bell on a variety of harmless code pieces.

But according to Sanjay Bhardwaj, Sanrasoft's CEO, this technology has already been tested and certified by India's Ministry of Information Technology and is awaiting a patent filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office under the Patents Conventions Treaty.

Stay tuned.

More reviews about Rudra software.

More free tools to check and scan your system now:
Free Online Spyware and Virus Scanners: Is My PC Infected?