Panda Security, a well known security  software company based in Madrid, has recently begun beta testing a new Windows anti-virus solution based on cloud computing.  We’re big on cloud computing and thin clients here at digitalmissive, so this warrants a few words…

Perhaps due to their Madrid location and the warm/fuzzy Panda-themed user interface, the company has had more of a US presence in the consumer space than in the enterprise - where Mcafee, Symantec, and Trend Micro rule.   However, I’ve used Panda anti-virus solutions in the past and been happy with the software - in fact, with the amount of malware coming out of Russia and Eastern Europe, I viewed their European location as an advantage.

Previous Panda anti-virus solutions (like all others) were traditional locally  installed- applications, though -  what’s interesting about this new solution is the cloud-based architecture - a lightweight local client talks to the Panda servers, which carry out the actual scanning remotely.  Off the bat, I can think of several advantages to this approach:

• Panda Cloud Antivirus uses something they call “Collective Intelligence.”  What this means is that each and every thin Panda Cloud Antivirus client “phones home” to the  Panda servers whenever any new strain of malware is encountered, allowing the centralized remote detection engine to be continuously updated (and providing Panda with up-to-the-second data concerning infection outbreaks, upon which all manner of optimizations could potentially be based).  In a way, one could think of it as peer-to-peer anti-virus protection.  It makes a lot of sense.

• Secondly, there’s a particularly insidious type of malware known as rootkits.  Rootkits are able to live at a very low level - as close to the physical machine as the operating system itself.  In a nutshell, what this means is that a locally installed antivirus program can no longer trust what its host operating system is telling it (much like that point in most thrillers when the hero’s best friend turns out to have been one of the bad guys all along).  While various methods can be used to get around this and remove rootkits (such as booting into “Safe Made” or a dedicated boot CD such as BartPe), these are somewhat challenging for the average user to manage (trust me - I’ve had to do both at various times).   A much better solution is to have the anti-virus application running on an external trusted operation system - in the cloud.

All in all, an interesting approach to consumer anti-virus protection - look for similar products from competitors in the future.