IssViews Forum

Immunet Protect Free 2.0
REVIEW DATE:06.17.10
by Neil J. Rubenking

The antivirus business is a lot like the exterminator business. You can have the very best exterminator fumigate your apartment, but the cockroaches just hightail it over to visit your neighbors. As soon as the fumes disperse, they're ba-ack. For a permanent solution you need all your neighbors—maybe everybody on the block—to debug their own domiciles. That's the idea behind the community-centric Immunet Protect Free 2.0 (free, direct). By its nature, this cloud-based antivirus solution encourages community-based protection. I like the idea, but the protection itself needs work.

Growing a Community
Immunet's founders earned their security chops working at McAfee and Symantec. They hope to bring antivirus protection to the fifty percent of Internet-connected users who currently have no protection at all. That would be roughly a billion users who clearly haven't been reached by other vendors. With Immunet, every user automatically becomes an ambassador for the product through the "My Community" feature.

Users can send a standardized e-mail invitation to any friend or associate's e-mail address or blast an invite to any or all connections in their Gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail contact list. Each person who installs and uses Immunet as a result of your emails shows up on the "My Community" page. (Those already using Immunet can still connect; they get a different invitation message). In testing, I found the Gmail connection didn't work for me, however. Immunet verified that "throttling" by Google can interfere with this feature if you have more than a few dozen contacts.

Friends who join your network appear as links in a graphical depiction of your community. A statistics box shows the number of people you've connected and threats you've stopped; another box shows aggregate statistics for your country. Immunet calculates a "protection factor" based on your figures. After running malware tests, my protection factor is 100, which Immunet tells me is normal. You can also click any of your direct community contacts to see their statistics and protection factor—Immunet co-founder Alfred Huger boasts a protection factor of nearly 11 million!

The idea, of course, is that you ensure all of your friends and regular correspondents are using antivirus protection, so they don't infect you. Those who already have security installed can disregard the Immunet message. Those who don't can easily install this free solution. At present, the counter built into Immunet reports over a quarter million users. Sounds like a lot, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the company's target, the billion or so users with no antivirus protection.

Cloud security upstart Immunet aims for antiviruses
by Seth Rosenblatt

Common Windows security wisdom says it's a bad idea to run multiple antivirus apps simultaneously. However, that's not always the case, and Immunet's latest update intends to bolster your existing protection with help from the cloud and the crowd. Available exclusively Thursday on CNET Download.com, Immunet 2.0 introduces new scanning tools, detection engines, and support in a bid to convince users that the program is the spackle they need to plug the holes in their security wall.

Similar to PC Tools' ThreatFire, which didn't originally address virus-related threats but does now, Immunet seeks to present a lightweight method to enhance already-installed protection. Immunet CEO Oliver Friedrichs and the company's vice president of engineering, Alfred Huger, pointed to the effectiveness of properly leveraged, community-based protection while at a cafe outside this year's RSA Conference in March. "There's a tremendous amount of energy spent on protecting users from threats they'll never encounter," Huger said.

On features alone, there's no doubt that Immunet 2.0 is a better product than its predecessor. The free version offers a new cloud-based detection engine called ETHOS, on-demand scanning, in-product updates, a visual representation of the Immunet communty, a silent gaming mode, and a stream from the Immunet security blog. Huger explained ETHOS as, "a broadbased cache engine, basically a heuristics engine."

Generally, these features all worked fairly well. The community features let you invite friends to use Immunet, which serves Immunet's purposes by getting more users, and serve the network's purposes since threat detections are immediately passed up into the cloud and distributed. In theory, this would prevent errors of the kind that McAfee suffered in April, since a false positive on one computer would conflict with the community's otherwise safe rating. The community feature also displays in a somewhat-interactive graphic how your personal community contributes to the larger Immunet collective.