AV Vendor Adopts 'Herd' Intelligence

The flood of new malware samples anti-malware firms are sorting in their labs is so overwhelming that AV vendor Panda Security compares it to a denial-of-service attack: "It's a denial of service on AV labs trying to keep up with it," says Gary Leibowitz, general manager of Panda Security USA, which receives 3,000 to 4,000 samples of new malware daily. So his company on Monday will release a new version of its AV software that moves that analysis from the lab to the "cloud" to help it get a better handle on emerging threats such as those targeting Web 2.0 applications, Dark Reading has learned.

Panda's new version of its Panda Security for Business will include this "community cloud" feature, where the anti-malware process, computation, analysis, and signature comparisons are done by Panda's SaaS, drawing from threat information and trends with its users as well as the wider Internet community. It also comes with host intrusion prevention and auditing features.

A handful of other AV vendors have made similar moves, including ESET, Sana Security, and Prevx. Symantec's Norton Anti-Bot is based on its licensing of Sana's product, notes Andrew Jaquith, program manager for security research at The Yankee Group.

Jaquith says this strategy of moving what he calls "herd" intelligence into the cloud represents a major strategy shift for AV vendors. "Herd intelligence turns every endpoint into a malware collector, and allows decisions to be made collectively and much, much faster -- minutes versus days or months," he says. "Essentially, it inverts the laboratory model (top-down) that the AV vendors have been using for the last 20 years."

AV vendors just can't process the mounds of malware samples they receive quickly enough, he says, which is exactly what malware authors have intended. "Vendors need to figure out how to counter a very deliberate strategy by malware authors, which is to flood the labs with unique samples," he says.

Jaquith says it's a matter of survival for AV vendors, which increasingly are looking for ways to reinvent themselves as their products struggle to thwart new types of infections. "Cloud-based, collective intelligence services are the next big thing for anti-malware. I expect that every AV vendor will need to embrace an approach like this if they expect to survive."

Ryan Sherstobitoff, chief corporate evangelist for Panda, says Panda's so-called Collective Intelligence technology would allow Panda to detect a new crimeware strain, for instance, by testing it against other samples as well as correlating any trends with it with various honeynet projects as well as its partners. "We could take behavioral traces and take it back to the cloud to do an instant calculation," Sherstobitoff says. "We go from analysis to remediation to automatically generating a signature file.

"And it's also gathering information from users in the community, and provides an instantaneous correlation with other parts of the globe to predict certain threat patterns, and whether something may be very targeted, or evolving on [multiple] machines," he says.

The key is that it's a software-as-a-service model, he says. "Normal online scanners have to download a 15 megabyte file with 200,000 threats," he says. "This sits up in cloud and has the capability taking the data and analyzing it and delivering the vaccines, but not as a huge file to the PC's."

Panda's new Panda Security for Business version 4.02SP1 is a free upgrade to existing corporate customers, and priced between $44 and $85, depending on the number of seats.

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