American Redoubt

Sophos, announced the availability of its Host Intrusion Prevention System (HIPS), which proactively identifies and blocks programs that behave suspiciously before they execute.

Sophos’s Behavioral Genotype Protection, which has been fully integrated into all of Sophos’s anti-virus solutions, can detect unknown spyware and malware without a false positive problem and without the need to install any additional software.

Unlike competing products, which monitor running code and intercept suspicious behavior once it has occurred, Sophos’s HIPS technology claims that it’s able to prevent malware from executing, identifying it at the gateway, on fileservers and at the endpoint, thus intercepting malicious code before in can cause any harm.

“Financially-motivated hackers are distributing new malware at a greater speed than ever before. Organisations need a strong defence which can proactively detect unknown threats as they emerge,” said Steve Munford, CEO of Sophos. “The beauty of Sophos’s new technology is that there is no need to roll-out new software. For no additional cost, customers can benefit from the power of our Behavioral Genotype Protection on every single operating system platform that we support. It’s a simple solution to a complex problem.” The new HIPS technology uses the existing Sophos scanning engine, which is present in all versions of Sophos endpoint, server and gateway products. With this integration, companies have the tools to combat the problem of unknown malware for no extra charge.

Sophos’s Genotype technology has proven to be world class in its detection of emerging malware threats. The technology was capable of proactively detecting the Sober-Z worm, the biggest malware outbreak of the last 12 months, a full 20 days ahead of other major security vendors.

Sophos’s Behavioral Genotype Protection has been fully integrated into all current versions of Sophos Anti-Virus. A free evaluation version of the software can be downloaded here.