Friday, March 29, 2024

‘Genotyping’ Fends off Onslaught of Virus Variants

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An IT administrator at the Maryland Department of the Environment no

longer worries about the alphabet soup of virus families that used to

plague his work day. Now he downloads one virus update and feels safe

from the onslaught of variants that is likely to follow.

”Keeping up with the updates was a real chore,” says Henry C. Torrance,

the lead computer network specialist at the state agency, which has 1,200

users, eight offices and 30 to 35 servers. ”I’m not worried about 10

patches a day. I’m just looking for one file that covers several

different viruses in the same family. It covers the alphabet soup.”

Torrance says the new genotyping technology from Sophos, Inc., an

anti-virus and anti-spam company with U.S. headquarters based in

Lynnfield, Mass., is slashing the time he has to allocate to dealing with

virus updates.

Sophos started using this genotyping technology last summer, according to

Marc Borbas, product manager for Gateway Solutions at Sophos. And since

then, they have been quietly working it into a growing number of virus

updates.

The genotype technology, according to Borbas, is designed to identify

variants of a particular malware family. For instance, once a genotype

update has been issued for Mydoom or Mytob, that one update is aimed at

protecting against the army of variants that will follow the original

worm or virus.

Borbas explains that genotyping looks for certain genetic characteristics

in one family. How does it interact with the operating system? Does it

copy itself to a certain folder? Does it open a backdoor? Does it infect

other files on your machine? Once these types of characteristics are

noted, the technology will look for them in any variants that may follow

the original malware, enabling the software to protect against the new

worm or virus without a new virus update being sent out.

”With viruses, it’s the variants that are becoming so hard to deal

with,” says Borbas. ”When something new comes out, you have to get it

in the lab and find out how to protect against it. That can take anywhere

from an hour and a half to a day or two days… What the genotype does is

add another layer of protection.”

Borbas acknowledges that other companies have tried and are working on

anti-virus software that detects behavior. Some of those have met with

dismal results because of a high rate of false positives. He says the

Sophos product is different because it looks for very specific traits.

”Mydoom had 50 or 60 variants,” he says, adding that genotyping

detected 77 percent of those variants from the single update. ”That

means if you’re a corporate security manager sitting there fighting the

Mydoom virus, 77 percent of the time you didn’t have to do anything.

Twenty-five percent of the time you did have to handle an update, but it

was a substantial improvement.”

Paul Stamp, an analyst at Forrester Research, an analyst firm based in

Cambridge, Mass., says some anti-virus companies have taken the approach

where they look for a straight match. Other companies have looked for

general behaviors. Few, if any, of those efforts worked.

Sophos’ genotyping, however, combines those two methods, and has a more

successful model, he says.

”This takes a layer of complexity out of the update process,” says

Stamp, who adds that he hasn’t seen this technology elsewhere yet. ”The

less frequently you have to do [updates], the less complicated it is.”

Sophos analysts are using the genotyping to both protect users against

viruses but also to help filter out spam, which often uses similar email

headers, key words and phrases, and patterns of html tags.

Andrew Jaquith, a senior analyst at the Boston-based analyst firm the

Yankee Group, says fighting virus writers and spammers today is always a

tricky business.

”Everybody is looking for more clever ways to get a leg up on the bad

guys,” he says. ”It’s an arms race. This represents an escalation on

the defense. So good for them. But then the bad guys will escalate.”

For today, anyway, Torrance says he has less updating to do and his users

are happier — and that’s a powerful combination for any IT shop.

”To be honest, I don’t even worry about my anti-virus updating system,”

he adds. ”That’s how reliable it’s been… We actually have end users

now who have emailed us back saying, ‘Thanks for choosing Sophos.’ That’s

a pretty bizarre testimonial from end users who don’t have any say in

what product we choose.”

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