McAfee proclaim an (almost) end to Botnet malware

McAfee have gathered 113 million core samples of malware signatures in the last year and they are going to use that information into a new software suite using behavioral heuristics in their code to spot unknown samples.

The final result could mean that botnets would be defeated, worldwide.

Pat Calhoun, the company's head of network security spoke to The Register and said “We're getting rid of malware signatures, all our systems now work on behavior and reputation,” he said. “Customers no longer have to worry about botnets; we will take care of that for them. We can catch things that no one else can in the industry.”

When Intel took over McAfee, they put extra funding into countering this growing threat from Botnets. They now have the ability to search for command and control server code.

McAfee say they have made 38 new improvements to their security suite and has finally cracked the integration of security products into a single package.

McAfee CTO Mike Fay said “You can’t take a set of tools, codify a few marketing relationships, and expect it to work. We have 150 such relationships and you need to merge them into a system. We've done this and over the next three years you're going to see more innovation as a result than in the last 10 of McAfee's history.”

McAfee have also announced that they have bought in sandboxing technology from ValidEdge which runs malware and other nasties in a virtual machine to test their effects on Windows and other systems, without letting it loose into the underlying code.

Kitguru says: If this actually works as they say, it is a security breakthrough.

Become a Patron!