Will your antivirus software catch the latest malware that just came out today? In most cases, no, because it simply does not know how to detect it yet. But ThreatFire’s ActiveDefense technology does, and has proven to provide up to 243% more protection when combined with traditional AntiVirus products.

ThreatFire is dramatically different to traditional antivirus software. Normal antivirus products usually need to have first identified and seen a threat before they can provide adequate protection against it. The protection is then provided via a signature or fingerprint update, which must first be written by an antivirus researcher. ThreatFire uses 5 different detectors that act together.

With this technology CloudAV produced a quality in-cloud antivirus system, which includes a lightweight, cross-platform host agent (Win32, Linux, FreeBSD, Sendmail/Postfix milter, Nokia Maemo) and a network service with ten antivirus engines (Avast, AVG, BitDefender, ClamAV, F-Prot, F-Secure, Kaspersky, McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro) and two behavioral detection engines (Norman Sandbox, CWSandbox).

Researchers evaluated this antivirus software programmes against 7,220 malware samples, including viruses, collected over a year. CloudAV, act in parallel to analyse a single incoming file. Each detector operates in its own virtual machine, so the technical incompatibilities and security issues are resolved.

CloudAV is accessible to any computer or mobile device on the network that runs a simple software agent. Each time a computer or device receives a new document or programme, that item is automatically detected and sent to the antivirus cloud for analysis.

CloudAV also caches analysis results, speeding up the process compared with traditional antivirus software. This could be useful for workplaces, for example, where multiple employees might access the same document.

But this system might be heavy on resources.