Immunet Corporation founded in July 2008 by a former executive of Symantec, has released a free antivirus product Immunet Protect. It combines the power of cloud computing with Collective Immunity concept.

Collective Immunity relies on three main principles: 1) community based protection, 2) cloud computing, 3) collective intelligence.

First, Immunet Protect can be integrated to social networks. Having the automated invitation system, it will send out the invitations to join the Immunet community to selected contacts. Second, instead of traditional centralized threat analysis and signature updates distribution from servers to clients, Immunet Protect uses decentralized approach to analyze new threats in clouds and distribute the updates to community from bottom nodes. Third, Immunet Protect is able to collect the detections from other third-party security software installed on a user’s PC, gather the information about threats in cloud and make it available to community immediately.

Taking into account that Immunet Protect is offered completely free of charge and that at least some of above features will function correctly in practice, we can definitely say we face a new generation of antivirus solutions.

Tags: antivirus, cloud computing, innovations, startup