“Your computer is not secure! Download our scanner now to help protect your PC!” This is probably the last pop-up you’ll see before all hell breaks loose. Most malware aren’t so obvious, and tend to hit you with very little effort from your part. These types of attacks can come from some obscure site you’ve never visited before, or even from sites you visit on a daily bases. Once activated, the damange the malware can do on your PC depends largely on other virus/malware detection programs you have in place. The problem is that the better you want your detection programs to work, the more restrictive they will be on your normal browsing activity. Well Invincea, Inc. (formerly known as Secure Command, Inc.) which was started in 2006 by one Dr. Anup Ghosh, believe they have come up with the ultimate solution. Move your browser to its own controlled virtual environment.
According to Websense Labs, the number of malicious Web sites grew 225 percent in the second half of 2009, and 71 percent of these are legitimate sites that have been compromised. According to PandaLabs, more than 25 million new strains of malware were created in 2009–that’s more than all the malware created over the past 20 years combined.
By running the browser in a virtual environment, the users are free to enable/install any addons without the fear of this effecting anything outside the virtual environment. Unlike usual detection programs, Invincea does not detect malware based on a signatuers databases that is updated daily. Instead it detects malicious behavior using proprietary sensors. When the browser is started, it is started in a pristine environment. Invincea then monitors for changes in that virtual environment to detect malicious activity. It performs real-time behavioral analysis of the events in the operating system and based on that determines if the environment has been compromised or not. Once it detects such activity, it simply resets the environment back to its pristine state, thus allowing the user to continue browsing, without the malicious activity having any effect on their PC.
Invincea Browser Protection is currently only available to Enterprise customers, they do plan on making it available to the general public, however the timing has not been finalized yet. They currently support Internet Explorer v6, v7 and v8, with support for Firefox coming soon. I for one can’t quite wait to test it out! Hope it happens soon 🙂
About the Author:
Hamish joined Bobcares in July of 2004, and since then has grown to be well versed in the Control Panels and Operating systems used in the Web Hosting industry today. He is highly passionate about Linux and is a great evangelist of open-source. When not at work, he keeps himself busy populating this blog with both technical and non-technical posts. When he is not on his Xbox, he is an avid movie lover and critic.
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