Symantec Patents Antivirus Tech

Symantec now holds a patent for histogram-based malicious code detection. The newly patented technology offers the promise of accelerated IT security Risk-threat detection.

According to the U.S Patent and Trade Office Abstract for patent number 6,971,019, the patent is for a virus-detection system that uses a histogram to detect the presence of a computer virus in a computer file.

A histogram typically involves some form of frequency-distribution analysis. In the case of Symantec’s patented histogram-based malicious code-detection technology, a prioritized count of instructions and behaviors is made that identifies code as it moves across a network.

Analysis of that movement is supposed to help make a determination as to whether there is a threat on the network.

The inventor, Carey Nachenberg, Symantec fellow and chief architect with Symantec Research Labs, claims that histogram-based malicious code detection is one of the most effective and efficient ways of solving the problem of complex threat detection.

“Without this technology, it would be extremely difficult to identify such threats without also significantly impacting performance,” Nachenberg said in a statement.

Nachenberg has been awarded seventeen patents in IT security since 1997.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com.