Webroot shoots for the cloud with SecureAnywhere

Webroot has become the latest security vendor to turn its efforts away from the traditional signature updates still favoured by a handful of vendors, with the launch of its SecureAnywhere cloud-based system.

Tuesday sees the launch of the consumer portfolio, but the business product to follow will be based on the same platform, so it's worth taking a few moments to identify the key differences between them.

The argument for switching to a cloud system is well rehearsed. Not only does it enable business customers to offer the same level of protection to employees no matter what their device, but it makes for a lighter security product and a more efficient way of blocking zero-day threats which signature updates fail to detect.

On first appearance, SecureAnywhere looks like many cloud-based threat protection systems on the market. A small agent sits on the user endpoint collecting threat data and sending it to the cloud for analysis.

However, Webroot's 6MB product is one of the lightest and least resource hungry on the market, the firm told V3.

Added to that, the product effectively "turns each laptop into a malware research centre", according to Webroot's Jacques Erasmus.

Although other products operate on a similar principle, Webroot's offering is defined by the sheer quantity of data it collects for analysis, enabling behaviour-based protection against the most sophisticated zero-day threats.

"We harvest all data from the endpoint in real time. No-one is doing that level of detail," he told V3. "They might get location and time but not the behaviour of something sitting on the machine. To get our infrastructure to handle that to scale is a real challenge and something we've been working on for eight years."

While the suspected malware is sandboxed on the machine, this data is sent to the cloud where researchers can assess any particularly new and interesting code, creating new rules according to the pattern of behaviour which will help instantly protect other Webroot users exposed to the same threat.

SecureAnywhere also contains Identity Shield, which creates a virtual cocoon around the browser to protect against key-loggers, screen grabbers and information stealing Trojans.

Android and iPhone versions are also available, although we'll have to wait a little longer to see whether the business-ready products built on this architecture live up to their promise.