Regular anti-virus protection for consumer computers is leaky at best, as a typical AV product catches only a quarter to half of all new malware signatures. According to GlobalSCAPE chief operating officer Craig Robinson, this was the impetus for brining application whitelisting to the consumer arena.
The San Antonio-based firm, which until this recent announcement had specialized in file transfer security solutions, intends to branch out into a consumer-based offering based on CoreTrace Corporation's enterprise-level application whitelisting technology. GlobalSCAPE previously announced, in January 2010, a strategic investment in Austin, Texas-based CoreTrace.
“We’ve taken the CoreTrace enterprise whitelisting engine and built a very user-friendly interface that sits on top of it”, Robinson proudly told Infosecurity. “This was really designed, ground up, for a consumer audience.”
Robinson added that the same technology can be applied by small or medium-sized business. “But the primary target is the consumer that has a laptop or netbook at home and recognizes that their current anti-virus is not getting the job done.”
The company plans to offer its new appShield product, currently under development, to consumers this coming summer.
Infosecurity was provided an advance demo of appShield at this year’s RSA Conference exposition. The product’s user dashboard is remarkably similar in appearance to dashboards available on many consumer-based security suites, which easily puts application whitelisting technology into the hands of even the most novice consumer familiar with typical home security products.
As Robinson shared, appShield’s launching point was the user experience, and not the whitelisting technology itself. “The beauty is that our product can run with anti-virus, and it can run without anti-virus”, added Jim Morris, GlobalSCAPE’s president and chief executive.
Morris said that most major industry analysts are predicting that anti-virus will be replaced by whitelisting over the next three to five years. Logically, he continued, his company is getting the jump on bringing this technology to consumers.
Empowering consumers with whitelisting technology could become vital in today’s age of social networking and the bounty of applications – some trusted, some nefarious – that the average home user navigates each day. Robinson said that appShield can help make decisions about application security more transparent, as the product makes use of GlobalSCAPE’s reputation service.
“Do you want to allow it? Do you want to block it?”, Robinson asked rhetorically. Both good questions that he hopes appShield will be able to address for the home user.