Trend Micro Inc has been stomping out digital varmints for more than a dozen years now. It has scanned, blocked and cleaned viruses on everything from floppy discs to e-mails.
Now, the company is anticipating a new threat -- poison applets. They are miniature programs that will invade any computer that accesses an infected Web page. All you need to do is open the page up.
At present, most applets aren't bad. They are just a part of the Java programming language, which is now widely used in Web-page design. More specifically, applets are bits of code embedded in Web pages. Once the page is opened, the applet automatically loads and executes.
One malicious applet, for example, appears as a bear that roars and roars and roars until you exit your browser. Others are more harmful and can turn control of your computer over to a remote user or erase memory.
Most of the time, however, these extra code strings are used to add functions. They perform acts such as opening extra browser windows. Trend uses an applet called HouseCall on its own Web site to offer free online virus scans.
Napster.com, a massively popular music trading site, uses similar technology to let its users share songs. Once someone downloads Napster software, every mp3 music file on his or her computer's hard drive is opened up to anyone who wants to download it, provided that the two computers are both online. The quasi-legal system has created an immense network for swapping music.
The suspicious side to HouseCall and Napster is that once enabled, they are granted free access to every part of your computer, including hard drive, CPU and network.
Most other applets work the same way, but you don't have the choice of turning them off or on. Most of the time, you don't even know they are there.
Fortunately, these strings of "mobile malicious code" are not yet widespread. Though Java has already been around for five years, and applets are not overly difficult to program, few hackers have picked up on them -- so far.
Trend, however, is not waiting for that to happen. The company has already anticipated the potential danger and prepared a solution, AppletTrap, which has been rated as the best shield against malicious applets by Forrester Research.
Company officials are convinced that the threat is slowly mounting. In the past, other such prognostications have been vindicated, such as Trend's server-side virus protection, which arrived a few years in advance of the market in 1994.
For now, however, Trend has other concerns, like the current plague of e-mail viruses. To combat the likes of Melissa, CIH and "ILOVEYOU," the anti-virus maker is moving away from the desktop and toward networks.
"For about a year and a half, we've been offering a solution called the `virus-free mailbox' as part of our InterScan," said Trend product manager, Denny Chang (
In Taiwan, however, neither Hinet nor any other service provider can currently offer comparable products.
In addition to blocking viruses at servers, the "virus-free mailbox" has other perks, such as spam guards. The system keeps out unsolicited e-mail by allowing users to block any e-mails from specified senders.
Spam guards aside, however, Trend's products offer almost completely uniform protection. "Technically, detection and cleaning capacity is the same for all of our products from PC-cillin to InterScan," Chang said. "Depending on your solution, maybe your e-mails will get scanned when they go through your ISP, then at your company's server and again at your workstation."
The one major drawback to network protection is a slower pace of information traffic created by continual scans. "There is always a security-performance trade-off, but we are trying to minimize it," Chang said.
Still, network protection has been proven as more effective and more reliable, largely because it is administered by computer specialists who monitor systems for errors and routinely update protection. "If you have one thousand computers in an office," Chang said, "how many of them really understand computers? And more important, how many of them will remember to download new pattern files every day?"
Pattern files are virus killers' methods for identifying and blocking mutating viruses. Since most viruses mutate, changing in both length and code sequence, they are better identified as patterns than fixed strings of code.
Such patterns files are created after viruses are discovered and isolated by Trend or its clients, who send them on to the company's virus doctors in Manila. There, the patterns are mapped and put onto the Internet, so users can update their software.
"It usually takes between 15 minutes and one day," Chang said. "Any longer and we'd be dead."
Chang did, however, also concede that delays before detection are uncontrollable, and often contribute to the scope of contamination. "That always happens with new types of viruses, like Melissa. It was one of the first Outlook worms."
"Worms are more powerful than viruses," he said, "because they don't need to attach themselves to files. They are programs that can survive independently in your computer."
To catch such unknown bugs, the company is trying to develop smarter software. "We try to simulate what that code will do when it gets in your computer. We have been able to do that with some types of Macros and we are also doing it with other virus types. For example, if the code wants to do something like send e-mail to everyone in your address book, we can try to stop that," Chang said.
But in the end, it still seems like Trend and other anti-virus providers will always be a step behind the virus writers. "Hackers are always ahead of the firewall vendors, and basically, our position is not that much different."
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