To detect and eliminate new viruses, antiviruses take a reactive approach: they have to wait until a virus appears and infects the first computers, and then update as fast as possible to combat it.
Until now, antivirus protection responded quickly enough to head off new viruses before they could spread widely. However, new viruses and intruders have recently emerged with the capacity to infect thousands of computers in a few hours , before antivirus protection can be updated to combat them.
SQLSlammer , MSBlaster , Sobig , Mydoom Netsky or Sasser are good examples of these new generation viruses, which use new means of propagation and exploit vulnerabilities in operating systems and the most widely used software, manipulating communications ports to launch denial of service attacks against servers and let hackers access the network.
Even if you have antivirus protection installed, your corporate network could be temporarily vulnerable to these new threats, as they spread almost instantly, faster than the time it takes to develop the vaccines to eliminate them and update the antivirus protection across the network .
Although the majority of attacks against networks are launched by known viruses—and therefore stopped by the antivirus protection—the cost of infections by unknown viruses, in terms of system recovery, loss of productivity, etc., are so high that it is essential to pre-empt their actions.
New TruPrevent Technologies automatically detect and block unknown viruses and intruders , even before your corporate antivirus has been updated to combat them and without administrator intervention.