Sandbox – Better Protection Against Known And Unknown Viruses
Norman takes one step further with innovative technology
The data security company Norman ASA today launches a new version of its top ranking antivirus software – Norman Virus Control, and updates its core technology – the virus scan engine – with a more advanced version of the Sandbox technology. This ensures additional protection against unknown viruses.
Norman has included a more advanced version of the SandBox technology in its latest version of Norman Virus Control. This innovative technology was first presented at the well-known Virus Bulletin conference last year when the technology was in its early stage of development. At this year’s VB conference in the end of September, Norman will present the next generation of SandBox, which will be expanded to emulating networks inside the virus scan engine.
SandBox is the world’s first virus scan engine implemented with a full-scale emulation of certain categories of suspicious code before the code is allowed to run in a real environment.
– Imagine that you open an e-mail attachment with a new and dangerous computer virus. The virus immediately starts changing selected system files, while other files are deleted. Very soon, your computer is wrecked. In addition, the virus is using the network to infect other computers. At least, that is what the virus believes. But in reality, no harm has been done. The virus has been tricked to reveal itself inside a closed, insulated environment in the search engine. You, and everyone else in the network, can carry on with your work as usual. This is what this new technology provides, says Kurt Natvig, responsible for the development of the SandBox technology at Norman ASA.
Additional improvements in Norman Virus Control version 5.4
In addition to the SandBox technology, there are other improvements worth noticing. In the new version Norman includes a filter, which automatically installs itself between the e-mail and newsgroup client and the Internet connection. This scan and block unwanted elements before they get into to the recipient’s mailbox and does the same for the outgoing traffic. The new module supports the following protocols: POP3, IMAP, SMTP and NNTP. Norman Virus Control is today among the few anti virus products able to block attachments and scan postings to newsgroups.
– Improved tool for administration in networks
– Completely new decompression and compression library, which makes it possible to scan the content of more than 30 different archive formats.
– Extracting archive files in memory increases the speed by ten times compared to earlier versions of Norman Virus Control.
– Improved tool for administration in networks
– Use of Unicode/MBCS for “Far East” versions. The Chinese version is available, first with Norman Virus Control version 5.4.
More detailed information about the next generation of the SandBox technology will be available on www.norman.com after the Virus Bulletin Conference, September 26. -27. 2002.