Saturday, April 28, 2007

Robot Genius!

Sorry for the lack of posts -- I was traveling all of last week.

Some recent press coverage of Robot Genius:

InfoWorld
Network World
Dark Reading
SC Magazine
Network World 2
PC World
Net Security

InfoWorld April 25, 2007: With a name like Robot Genius you wouldn't expect the company's leaders to be modest, but the more you hear the firm's Chairman Stephen Hsu talk about his startup's new approach to anti-malware, the more you believe the name might fit.

On April 30, the company founded by Hsu and James Hormuzdiar-- a partnership best known for building SSL VPN provider SafeWeb and selling it to Symantec for $26 million in 2003 -- will formally introduce a trio of behavior-based security products.

By taking a radically different approach to scanning the Web for malware code and using massive computing power to filter out every URL on the Internet responsible for serving up infections, Robot Genius' technologies will change the way people view anti-virus tools, Hsu said.

"We're entering an era where the scalability and bandwidth of machines allows for constant monitoring for malware by looking at the entire Web and studying every piece of downloadable software that's available," said Hsu. "Meanwhile, the current generation of virus-scanning applications, even behavior-based tools, has reached its limits in terms of finding the most sophisticated attacks, and lacks the ability to adequately fix problems once they're found."

...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The software download is currently free, when will you begin to charge for it and how much?

Anonymous said...

What is the average duration from the time malware is released to blacklisting? Does the crawler run only on RG's server farm or is it distributed across users as well (e.g., SETI)?

Steve Hsu said...

Wolfgang: we intend to keep it free for some time, even after the 1.0 release in a few weeks.

Greg: we work with one of the leading search engines and have access to their daily crawl data, so we can analyze a new executable url *before* it gets into the search results. We have our own crawler as well, but why reinvent the wheel?

When someone uses the client to clean up an infection we get that information back (a la SETI). Note the client knows the url from which the infection originated. This is one of our reasons for keeping the client free. There may be an enterprise version with additional features that we charge for.

Blog Archive

Labels