Immunet - Free Cloud Antivirus
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Is this a "whites only" antivirus? Looks like it from the pictures on the site. ;)
> Looks like it from the pictures on the site. Hmmm.... I can't comment. But I thing the brunnette in the middle is my future ex-wife.
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> Looks like it from the pictures on the site. Hmmm.... I can't comment. But I thing the brunnette in the middle is my future ex-wife.
Jeffrey Walton wrote:
future ex-wife.
Does that mean she is your wife currently?
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Is this a "whites only" antivirus? Looks like it from the pictures on the site. ;)
Dinobot_Slag wrote:
Is this a "whites only" antivirus?
I don't know about that, but does Harry Redknap know about Peter Crouch's part time job? (back right, 2nd in)
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
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Hi All, Immunet is a free, collective antivirus harnessing signatures and definitions from the cloud. They are in late BETAs and welcome both testers and users. http://www.immunet.com/[^]. Jeff
Hmm... Hard to properly gauge this product... The website has a heavy marketing slant, but of course that doesn't necessarily discredit the technology. The gist seems to be that you form a facebook-style social network of friends you're helping to "protect," by having your AV software intercommunicate and share its findings. The point seems to be to combine heuristic-type scanning with virus databases, so that when person A's AV client notices a threat it hasn't seen before, it immediately tells B, C, and D about this new threat's signature so they're more likely to notice it. So it raises the questions... 1) What's the advantage of this, over each client seeing the threat for itself? If everyone is running this software, and person A's client can detect the threat, then can't the others do the same without A's help? 2) If this is working alongside a regular AV program (As the site suggests is a good idea), you're doubling the overhead whenever a file is accessed (Depending on program settings, of course)... Is the extra protection worth twice the performance hit? 3) Before you can even talk about communication, your AV program still has to DETECT the threat. Is this program up to par, in relation to other commercial and free offerings? Granted, I'm no antivirus expert, so I may be misunderstanding how this thing is supposed to work... But the site seems geared towards the less-geeky types, so there's very little technical info.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in? Developer, Author (Guardians of Xen)
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Is this a "whites only" antivirus? Looks like it from the pictures on the site. ;)
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Hmm... Hard to properly gauge this product... The website has a heavy marketing slant, but of course that doesn't necessarily discredit the technology. The gist seems to be that you form a facebook-style social network of friends you're helping to "protect," by having your AV software intercommunicate and share its findings. The point seems to be to combine heuristic-type scanning with virus databases, so that when person A's AV client notices a threat it hasn't seen before, it immediately tells B, C, and D about this new threat's signature so they're more likely to notice it. So it raises the questions... 1) What's the advantage of this, over each client seeing the threat for itself? If everyone is running this software, and person A's client can detect the threat, then can't the others do the same without A's help? 2) If this is working alongside a regular AV program (As the site suggests is a good idea), you're doubling the overhead whenever a file is accessed (Depending on program settings, of course)... Is the extra protection worth twice the performance hit? 3) Before you can even talk about communication, your AV program still has to DETECT the threat. Is this program up to par, in relation to other commercial and free offerings? Granted, I'm no antivirus expert, so I may be misunderstanding how this thing is supposed to work... But the site seems geared towards the less-geeky types, so there's very little technical info.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in? Developer, Author (Guardians of Xen)
Hi Ian, > The gist seems to be that you form a facebook-style social > network of friends you're helping to "protect" ... I'm interested to see this in action. When Immunet made there inital announcement over a Security Focus, there were only about 80 of us testing. There was no twitter/craiglst/ circle of friends. > What's the advantage of this, over each client seeing > the threat for itself It could be the case that the local antivirus misses the detection. I would expect to see this as a new threat drops. As soon as one AV picks up a signature, others, including the local machine, can benefit. > If this is working alongside a regular AV program (As the site > suggests is a good idea), you're doubling the overhead > whenever a file is accessed I did not find this to be the case in earlier rounds. For example, one test case included *NO* local AV to examine cloud communications: "Hey, I have this file. Are any hosts aware of problems with the file?". In the case that AV is installed, the local AV will perform a hueristic match, and Immunet will reach out to the cloud (as is the case with no AV). The use case is the local AV misses, but the cloud hits. The driver is fairly robust - OSR lent their expertise. I was not able to crash it or BSOD it. Perhaps you might have better luck than me. > Is the extra protection worth twice the performance hit? To be determined by the user :) All in all, I did not experience a significant performance loss. Nothing noticeable in my case. > Before you can even talk about communication, your AV program > still has to DETECT the threat. The cloud helps out in the case of a miss. Jeff
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Damn, that brunette is hot tho. I am betting they rounded up everyone in the office for photos instead of paying someone to make sure their group of actors and models was racially diverse.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
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Damn, that brunette is hot tho. I am betting they rounded up everyone in the office for photos instead of paying someone to make sure their group of actors and models was racially diverse.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
Christian Graus wrote:
Damn, that brunette is hot tho.
Which one? I count 3 to 4 that might fall in that category! :)
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
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Hi Ian, > The gist seems to be that you form a facebook-style social > network of friends you're helping to "protect" ... I'm interested to see this in action. When Immunet made there inital announcement over a Security Focus, there were only about 80 of us testing. There was no twitter/craiglst/ circle of friends. > What's the advantage of this, over each client seeing > the threat for itself It could be the case that the local antivirus misses the detection. I would expect to see this as a new threat drops. As soon as one AV picks up a signature, others, including the local machine, can benefit. > If this is working alongside a regular AV program (As the site > suggests is a good idea), you're doubling the overhead > whenever a file is accessed I did not find this to be the case in earlier rounds. For example, one test case included *NO* local AV to examine cloud communications: "Hey, I have this file. Are any hosts aware of problems with the file?". In the case that AV is installed, the local AV will perform a hueristic match, and Immunet will reach out to the cloud (as is the case with no AV). The use case is the local AV misses, but the cloud hits. The driver is fairly robust - OSR lent their expertise. I was not able to crash it or BSOD it. Perhaps you might have better luck than me. > Is the extra protection worth twice the performance hit? To be determined by the user :) All in all, I did not experience a significant performance loss. Nothing noticeable in my case. > Before you can even talk about communication, your AV program > still has to DETECT the threat. The cloud helps out in the case of a miss. Jeff
Well, see, it sounds like the software involves everyone trusting that the all-powerful "cloud" knows everything. But the "cloud" is just made up of other people running this same program. So the real question is how EvilProgram.exe gets marked as "bad" by one computer, but not by another, when they're both using this Immunet program to scan it. In that situation, the other computers would be able to use the shared knowledge to mark it as bad... But if they're all running the same Immunet program, why don't the others detect it too? The only benefit I DO see is that if these things can pick up on when the user's normal AV software detects something, they could use the "cloud" to share the benefits of that program. For example, I'm running Norton and you're running Mcafee... Mine scans EvilProgram.exe as a virus, so my Immunet tells your Immunet about it, even though Mcafee doesn't pick it up (Or vice versa). EDIT: After a bit of googling, I can see that's exactly what it's meant to do... It's designed to share information between people running different primary AV software, though some reviews have spoken poorly of its detection rates when not working behind another program.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in? Developer, Author (Guardians of Xen)
modified on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 4:51 PM
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Well, see, it sounds like the software involves everyone trusting that the all-powerful "cloud" knows everything. But the "cloud" is just made up of other people running this same program. So the real question is how EvilProgram.exe gets marked as "bad" by one computer, but not by another, when they're both using this Immunet program to scan it. In that situation, the other computers would be able to use the shared knowledge to mark it as bad... But if they're all running the same Immunet program, why don't the others detect it too? The only benefit I DO see is that if these things can pick up on when the user's normal AV software detects something, they could use the "cloud" to share the benefits of that program. For example, I'm running Norton and you're running Mcafee... Mine scans EvilProgram.exe as a virus, so my Immunet tells your Immunet about it, even though Mcafee doesn't pick it up (Or vice versa). EDIT: After a bit of googling, I can see that's exactly what it's meant to do... It's designed to share information between people running different primary AV software, though some reviews have spoken poorly of its detection rates when not working behind another program.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in? Developer, Author (Guardians of Xen)
modified on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 4:51 PM
Ian Shlasko wrote:
Well, see, it sounds like the software involves everyone trusting that the all-powerful "cloud" knows everything. But the "cloud" is just made up of other people running this same program.
This does not make any sense to me. I can see the cloud helping if nodes of the cloud were running different software but not the same.
John
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Well, see, it sounds like the software involves everyone trusting that the all-powerful "cloud" knows everything. But the "cloud" is just made up of other people running this same program. So the real question is how EvilProgram.exe gets marked as "bad" by one computer, but not by another, when they're both using this Immunet program to scan it. In that situation, the other computers would be able to use the shared knowledge to mark it as bad... But if they're all running the same Immunet program, why don't the others detect it too? The only benefit I DO see is that if these things can pick up on when the user's normal AV software detects something, they could use the "cloud" to share the benefits of that program. For example, I'm running Norton and you're running Mcafee... Mine scans EvilProgram.exe as a virus, so my Immunet tells your Immunet about it, even though Mcafee doesn't pick it up (Or vice versa). EDIT: After a bit of googling, I can see that's exactly what it's meant to do... It's designed to share information between people running different primary AV software, though some reviews have spoken poorly of its detection rates when not working behind another program.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in? Developer, Author (Guardians of Xen)
modified on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 4:51 PM
Hi Ian, > everyone trusting that the all-powerful "cloud" knows everything I know... I worry about the cloud myself. I find Google and the PATRIOT act are especially worrisome. > So the real question is how EvilProgram.exe gets marked as > "bad" by one computer, but not by another... But if they're > all running the same Immunet program, why don't the others > detect it too? I imagine this would be the convergence problem (or a variant thereof) that Dykstra studied in the 60's and still plagues routers to this day. Perhaps you should hit the folks at Immunet directly with the questions. If you have the questions, others probably have them also. I suggest it because I have no affiliation with the company, so you would probably get better answers. Jeff
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Well, see, it sounds like the software involves everyone trusting that the all-powerful "cloud" knows everything. But the "cloud" is just made up of other people running this same program. So the real question is how EvilProgram.exe gets marked as "bad" by one computer, but not by another, when they're both using this Immunet program to scan it. In that situation, the other computers would be able to use the shared knowledge to mark it as bad... But if they're all running the same Immunet program, why don't the others detect it too? The only benefit I DO see is that if these things can pick up on when the user's normal AV software detects something, they could use the "cloud" to share the benefits of that program. For example, I'm running Norton and you're running Mcafee... Mine scans EvilProgram.exe as a virus, so my Immunet tells your Immunet about it, even though Mcafee doesn't pick it up (Or vice versa). EDIT: After a bit of googling, I can see that's exactly what it's meant to do... It's designed to share information between people running different primary AV software, though some reviews have spoken poorly of its detection rates when not working behind another program.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in? Developer, Author (Guardians of Xen)
modified on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 4:51 PM
Ian Shlasko wrote:
EDIT: After a bit of googling, I can see that's exactly what it's meant to do... It's designed to share information between people running different primary AV software
Now that makes some sense. I wonder if sharing virus definitions from one antivirus vendor to another is legal. Or this is just for new unknown threats.
John
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Ian Shlasko wrote:
EDIT: After a bit of googling, I can see that's exactly what it's meant to do... It's designed to share information between people running different primary AV software
Now that makes some sense. I wonder if sharing virus definitions from one antivirus vendor to another is legal. Or this is just for new unknown threats.
John
My guess (Not a lawyer!) would be that there's nothing illegal about it, but the AV companies won't be happy if this catches on. It effectively means that only one person in a social network would have to run their product for everyone to benefit from it. If something like this really became commonplace, I can see three possible outcomes... 1) The commercial AV vendors band together to create a central listing so they can do something similar (And charge for it) 2) Commercial AV software is modified to no longer play nice with Immunet (i.e. don't let it see when a threat is detected and blocked), effectively neutralizing it. 3) Commercial AV software ceases to be a viable business model, and AV detection rates in general decline significantly. The commercial vendors, I believe, invest a great deal of money into analyzing and building fixes for new threats, and they won't do this if they can't make a profit. (Might be a combination of some of the above)
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in? Developer, Author (Guardians of Xen)
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Hi All, Immunet is a free, collective antivirus harnessing signatures and definitions from the cloud. They are in late BETAs and welcome both testers and users. http://www.immunet.com/[^]. Jeff
Sorry about the miserable copy/paste from email. ================================================ from Alfred Huger alfred@xxxxxxx.com to noloader@xxxxx.com date Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 4:54 PM subject Re: [CodeProject] Re: Immunet - Free Cloud Antivirus mailed-by immunet.com Thanks for sending that. It made me giggle. For what it's worth there is only one 'white' guy in the company. He is very much the minority. It's a stock photo. You're free to repost this. al On 09/09/09 1:40 PM, "Jeffrey Walton" noloader@xxxxx.com wrote: > Hi Al, > > See the comment at > http://www.codeproject.com/Messages/3191400/Re-Immunet-Free-Cloud-Antivirus.as > px. > Sorry about that. >
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Sorry about the miserable copy/paste from email. ================================================ from Alfred Huger alfred@xxxxxxx.com to noloader@xxxxx.com date Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 4:54 PM subject Re: [CodeProject] Re: Immunet - Free Cloud Antivirus mailed-by immunet.com Thanks for sending that. It made me giggle. For what it's worth there is only one 'white' guy in the company. He is very much the minority. It's a stock photo. You're free to repost this. al On 09/09/09 1:40 PM, "Jeffrey Walton" noloader@xxxxx.com wrote: > Hi Al, > > See the comment at > http://www.codeproject.com/Messages/3191400/Re-Immunet-Free-Cloud-Antivirus.as > px. > Sorry about that. >
Jeffrey Walton wrote:
from Alfred Huger to noloader@xxxxx.com date Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 4:54 PM subject Re: [CodeProject] Re: Immunet - Free Cloud Antivirus mailed-by immunet.com Thanks for sending that. It made me giggle. For what it's worth there is only one 'white' guy in the company. He is very much the minority. It's a stock photo. You're free to repost this. al
Also, although you can not be 100% sure when going just by a name, "many times", a name can indicate an ethnic background. So, with that thought in mind: From: http://www.immunet.com/about/advisors[^] Raj Jain - former President and Chief Technical Officer, Kintana Art Wong - former Senior Vice President, Symantec Also, from: http://www.immunet.com/contact[^] Immunet is located in Palo Alto, California on Middlefield Road at Colorado Ave. Members of our team are also located in Calgary, Canada and Hyderabad, India. I do agree that it's a poor choice for a web site photo that's suppose to represent the company. ____________ Joe
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Hi All, Immunet is a free, collective antivirus harnessing signatures and definitions from the cloud. They are in late BETAs and welcome both testers and users. http://www.immunet.com/[^]. Jeff
I wonder if you could spoof it into believing a legit program is a virus, then it will tell all of its friends and next thing you know the antivirus is the virus.
_____________________________ There is no I in team. But there is meat in there.