The field of malware available in 2007 was drastically different as well. The wait and see approach worked well, as there were less than half a million known threats to deal with. Now, there are nearly 60,000 new threats appearing for computer users each day, according to Symantec. Most of these viruses and malware are just slightly altered versions of threats that are already known, but they're altered enough to avoid detection by database protection that relies on virus signatures to determine whether or not the file is harmful.
Because of the massive jump in
the creation of threats, the protection of computers based on
generating virus signatures is no longer a practical method of
warding off threats. Symantec recognizes this and for that reason,
Endpoint 12.1 features some of the most comprehensive virus
protection available on the market.
How It Works
SEP 12.1 offers cloud security technology and data protection in the form of a feature called Insight. Insight is able to gather information from around 175 million other Symantec users and rank files for each of these users according to their age, behavior, and reputation. Because each of Symantec's 175 million customers are connected through Insight, malware variants are quickly flagged and dealt with more quickly than singular virus protection on a single computer. Because most of the processing of files is done in the cloud and the system doesn't need to scan relentelessly, system overhead can be reduced by nearly 70%.
