Panda Cloud Antivirus hits Internet for free
SEATTLE -- Panda Security CEO Juan Santana says he has come up with a Web-based silver bullet that will slay computer viruses like Conficker and Koobface before they take root on your PC.
"The threat climate demands a new protection model," Santana says.
The next few weeks will dictate how well his assertions hold up, as reviewers and consumers test drive the new Panda Cloud Antivirus service.
In an attempt to shake up the lucrative antivirus subscription market, Panda is tapping into two hot tech trends: Web-based "cloud" computing and free technology giveaways. Microsoft later this year will offer free basic antivirus protection, code-named Morro. And McAfee and AVG recently launched free protection tools to supplement their paid antivirus suites.
Traditional antivirus protection from companies such as Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro come in hefty, power-sapping programs that reside on your PC's hard drive to filter out known malicious programs. Because cybercriminals have become adept at tweaking their attacks to sneak through, the software companies must update protection "signatures" on each PC at least once a day.
Panda Wednesday becomes the first consumer antivirus supplier to centralize this filtering and updating routine — by moving it into a data center sitting in the Internet cloud. To tap into this free service, you download a small pop-up dashboard from www.cloudantivirus.com.
The dashboard connects your PC to Panda's data center, which monitors suspicious coding that comes into contact with your PC. Panda can now amass intelligence about hackers' techniques, equipping it to more swiftly predict the bad guys' next moves, Panda senior researcher Pedro Bustamante says.
While the data center keeps track of anything that looks remotely suspicious, it will take action only if an unauthorized program begins to execute on your PC. "A virus is basically harmless until it's loaded into memory and executed," says Martin McKeay, author of the Network Security Blog/Podcast, who was briefed on Panda's new service.
Related Stories
ABC News Live