Independent Lab Demonstrates Most AV Products Fail to Stop New Multiple Variant Attacks
LINDON, Utah — A recent comparative laboratory test conducted by Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) found that most enterprise anti-virus (AV) products frequently fail to stop custom malware variants commonly used by hackers today. The ISE test, which reviewed the performance of major AV software products, determined that Avinti’s iSolation Server[TM] generally outperformed other solutions with a catch rate of 98.8% and that only two vendors, Avinti and Symantec, stopped greater than 90 percent of all malware variant instances used in the study. Other vendors total catch rates for all malware tested ranged from 53% to 11%.
ISE conducted a test that simulated a common technique of virus writers who wish to evade traditional AV signature-based products, morphing existing viruses to make them unrecognizable. The test was created without specific knowledge of any of the AV products tested. Thousands of virus variants were tested against the eight AV solution vendors, including Avinti, Symantec, McAfee, Tumbleweed, Ironport, Proofpoint, Trend Micro, and Barracuda.
"We found that overall [Avinti's] iSolation Server was the most effective of the products we tested at discovering non-standard malware variants. Many of the other products in our tests were substantially less effective, allowing significant majorities of our malware corpus to pass undetected." - taken from ISE Comparative Test Results study, May 18, 2007.
The lab test was commissioned by Avinti[TM], a developer of proactive e-mail security solutions, with the objective of determining if there is a quantifiable difference in other products and a benefit to using the company’s iSolation Server product to stop new malware and variants. The test used over 4,200 new malware variants that were passed through each of the products. The test not only proved iSolation Server’s unique approach stopped more malware than the other seven products tested, but also identified a major weakness in most AV products being sold today: a difficulty in stopping malware variants that are modified using very common tools.
"We feel like this test was very representative of the way new malware variants are developed," said Avi Rubin, the President and co-Founder of Independent Security Evaluators. "The corpus of e-mail used for this test was created from common viruses and were modified using publicly available and home-grown tools similar to those used to get by traditional AV filters."
"We were pleased to validate that Avinti’s proactive approach to observing the actual behavior of suspect messages is the most successful in stopping new malware and virus attacks that are so common today," said William Kilmer, Avinti CEO. "We know from our own customers that iSolation Server catches many new threats and variants that are missed by other solutions, but this also demonstrates that signature-based AV products alone are not an adequate defense against new malware and mass virus variants as they are easily circumvented. We believe Avinti’s iSolation Server is a unique complementary technology to catch what traditional AV products miss."
Avinti’s iSolation Server, a proactive security solution, is designed to stop stealthy, complicated threats such as zero-day malware attacks, targeted threats, blended threats, and mass variants. Its patent-pending technology complements existing security solutions by detecting threats without the use of signatures. Avinti’s approach is unique because it safely observes actual behavior of potentially threatening messages, rather than relying on reactive signature-based approaches. iSolation Server sends high-risk messages to the high-performance Observation Engine[TM], which proactively observes the actual behavior of the message or content in a secure and protected environment — then quickly delivers clean messages while quarantining malware and other identified threats.
The full ISE report and details of individual vendor performance can be downloaded for free at www.avinti.com/bestdefense. For more information on Avinti and its iSolation Server, visit www.avinti.com.
About Avinti
Avinti is a proactive e-mail security solutions company with a different approach to protecting enterprises from security threats. Avinti’s iSolation Server proactively and safely block threats not detected by traditional security solutions. Avinti has customers in a variety of industries, including financial services, health care, service providers and education. The company’s investors include Sequel Venture Partners, Symantec, and vSpring Capital.
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