Immunet Protect- Free cloud based AV

According to this blog post Ethos was active in 1.0.24

"We’ve now shipped Immunet Protect Beta Build 1.0.24(67). This build represents our introduction of the new ETHOS Protection engine as well as a series of detection improvements to our current Cloud Engine technologies.

ETHOS Protection is a 'Heuristic' based engine. ETHOS Protection is specially designed to find threats 'generically' and then send them to the cloud so people in the Immunet Community can be protected from them at the same time as you detect them. ETHOS examines every file executed, downloaded and flash scanned. If you’re wondering what this means in practical terms it is this; our detection rates jump at least 3 times with this new offering. For the next several weeks ETHOS will be ‘on the job training’. This means the engine will be reviewing data but not yet ‘convicting’ it. At the end of the ‘training period’ we’ll flip the on switch and people should start seeing a marked increase in malware detections!"

 

It has not been a few weeks yet, so I am not sure if it is still in training, or active.

 

ETHOS is not working yet, the 1.0.24 is like the old one but with more definitions and less bugs

 

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Thanks for clarifying that...

 

http://blog.immunet.com/

Looks like Immunet is positioning as the cloud-version of SAS and/or MBAM.

 

Yes, very interesting the last post in the blog, thanks for the alert.

 

http://blog.immunet.com/

New beta

The primary changes in 1.0.26 are:

* Fixed an installer issue where some driver failures were occurring on Windows XP SP3 systems.
* Changed our installation process to ensure cleaner removal and installation of drivers.
* Changed our internal logging to add additional wide character support.
* Addressed 54 additional issues reported in field from previous builds.
* Added additional conviction logic into our back office.
* Rounded out support for OEM functionality.

 

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There is a setting for enabling/disabling the Ethos component now. I don't remember seeing this in 1.0.25

 

That setting has been there for the past several versions. It was very easy to overlook, as you have to scroll down to find it since the window was not large enough to show everything.

I casually read their commodity posts, which leads me to believe Ethos was rolled out at a slow pace and that perhaps not all users were involved in initial testing. It seems Immunet can control how widespread the Ethos roll out or testing is, which seems to make a lot of sense. My computers are now registered with their website. Don't know if that makes a difference, but I have read that registration makes "more" available to the user.

 

Just a question, does this run ok with microsoft security essentials or panda cloud AV?

 

I believe it works with MSSE but not Panda since the later is more of a cloud based AV. However I did not try it personally with MSSE. It seems to run fine with Avast 5 but I removed Immunet since Avast 5 seemed to snag anything I threw at it.

Ice

 

Thanks. I might add Immunet to a friend's MSSE setup.

 

I tried it with panda cloud AV without problems some weeks ago

 

i have it also with pandacloud without problems

 

How good is this product?
It looks very interesting.

 

For now the detection is a bit poor, ETHOS is not active in all the installations, but the next big release will be in April and will improve the detection a lot, by now Immunet is still consider a beta version.

 

@guest
What exactly will they add to boost their detection in the april-release? A local signature database?

 

ETHOS, their new heuristic engine. They're building up white-listing resources right now to soon activate ETHOS for detection of zero-day malware.

 

@raven211
I see, thanks. As I stated before somewhere else, their current detection ratio was (almost terrible) low. I really hope they'll be able to crank up their detection since the program itself is very light.

 

Immunet, even though its a startup brings nothing new to the table. The cloud anti-malware train moved out of the station a long time ago and they missed it. To me, it looks like they want to create just enough buzz to hopefully get acquired by one of the bigger guys.

 

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The only other freeware cloud based AV I'm aware of is Panda CAV (and it doesn't recommend installing along side other AVs). One other similar product doesn't make Immunet Protect (IP) irrelevant IMHO. Although the security suites are beginning to include cloud technology the advantage of something like IP is it gets along with most everything. I like being able to run it along side NIS 2010 for a second opinion. Prevx is similar, but not freeware of course.

 

I agree, just because there are similar products on the market doesn't immediately make Immunet irrelevant. If that were the case, then every security suite offering anything similar to another product could be written off with the same ease.

I've been running Immunet alongside VIPRE and haven't had any issues whatsoever. Their support folks are very responsive and receptive to feature requests and bugfix submissions.

 

Good to know coz Immunet has only mediocre detection rate

 

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I heard this great phrase once on a TV show:

"In the life of everything that works there was a time when it didn't"

Hopefully this will prove true here

 

Immunet teams with the ClamAV team: http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20100302005424&newsLang=en