The trend to blog or uploading their photographs onto the internet has never been hotter. Youtube and similar websites are also gaining popularity. All these are built on the Web 2.0 framework, and make up a significant number of websites. Some of which will inevitably be infected with malware. For example, hackers can trick you to click on some malicious URLs that they leave on chat forums. Or they can also post some interesting pictures online, telling you to “click here” if you would like to see other pictures of the album. Needless to say, you will get infected if you followed their instructions. It is quite difficult to differentiate such threats without an Anti-Virus program. You may not even be able do so with an Anti-virus program as there are so many variants of virus, the number is shocking. This is why you need to constantly update your virus definitions. But are you sure what you have downloaded is really the “latest”?
What you have downloaded will be the latest virus definition developed by the Anti-Virus company, and that is based on samples collected 3 to 5 days ago. This lead time would have allowed hackers to come up with new variants which are already flooding the internet. Hence, other than updating your virus definitions, we will also need to rely on “In-the-Cloud” technology.
Currently, Trend Micro Anti-virus programs including PC-cillin TIS 2009 series are already using “In-the-Cloud” technology to put an immediate stop to malware infection.
The common problem facing anti-virus is that the virus definitions are not able to keep up to date in time. For example, if a virus sample has been discovered today and is added to the list of virus definition for users to download, new variants are appearing by the seconds while this is being done. It is virtually impossible for users to be updated by the second. At most, this is done every few hours. So what can be done within the few hours gap? This is where the beauty of In-the-Cloud” technology comes in. When a dubious file has been found, “In-the-Cloud” technology will check on where the file is located on the web and the registered owner of the location. This includes the registered IP, DNS, duration of the file being online and all related information. With these information, it is generally able to fish out the source of the file and it is related to any WORM / Bot, to determine whether the file is malicious in nature.
For a user, he does not need to update his virus definitions. Whenever he browse a new website, all the web content components would have been verified against our database with TIS or TIS Pro before downloading, which will in turn inform the PC-cillin TIS 2009 series of anti-virus programs if it is safe or not. In a nutshell, we are thus able to be updated with the latest information from the web which virus definition updates are unable to achieve.
Today, most malware are aimed at information thefts and are targeted at popular websites. When there is a sudden surge of users enquiring on the same URLs or files, it translates that they highly dubious. Hence, this infrastructure works out to be more accurate and dependable with increased number of users.
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