NovaShield Aims Antimalware Software At SMBs, Consumers

PRESS RELEASE

MADISON, Wis. - November 10, 2008 - NovaShield, Inc., a leader in advanced anti-malware technology, today announced the first commercial release of NovaShield Anti-Malware version 2.5. Offered as a free public beta and trial product for the past 6 months, NovaShield leverages leading academic research and a 6-month public beta to deliver a customer-tested, yet radically new approach designed to detect, block, and remove sophisticated and rapidly morphing malware. NovaShield 2.5 is uniquely architected to help protect consumers against modern threats such as drive-by-downloads, Trojans, keyloggers and rootkits, as well as traditional threats such as viruses and worms.

The Problem with Traditional Technologies For years, anti-virus solutions have focused on identifying malware by using signatures as a tag to mark and quarantine known threats. However, these solutions have been found by leading security academics and researchers to be ineffective when faced with new emerging threats. Many threats have not yet entered signature databases while others can mutate to avoid signature matching.

A new breed of "behavior-based" anti-malware approaches have launched over the past few years. These solutions focus on identifying malware behaviors, as opposed to their signatures. But this first generation of behavior-based solutions were marked by higher than average false positive rates, which meant they identified harmless software as being malware.

"Today's hackers are targeting unsuspecting PC users by silently infecting computers to send spam, perform web attacks and carry out other crimes," said John Mitchell, professor of computer science at Stanford University. "Infected computers often show no symptoms of infection, making it difficult to know you've got a problem. Anti-malware solutions need to be innovative and need to be catching new threats."

Introducing a New Behavior-based Approach - Specification-based Protection Based on breakthrough research at the University of Wisconsin's leading computer science and security lab and with backing from the National Science Foundation, NovaShield Anti-Malware approaches malware detection through a break-through form of behavior-based threat detection called specification-based monitoring.

Whereas traditional signature-based anti-virus solutions rely on hundreds of thousands of policies to detect potential threats and require an average 19-day window of exposure before a new infection can be detected, removed and blocked, NovaShield Anti-Malware's underlying specification-based technology employs fewer than a dozen generalized policies that identify malicious activities in real-time.

"Our approach is well designed to supplement the protection afforded by current signature-scanning anti-virus programs by taking on what traditional technologies cannot," said Dr. Somesh Jha, co-founder and chief scientist at NovaShield. "This software is optimized to detect emerging threats, stop rapidly-morphing malware that circumvents signatures and firewalls, and effectively and thoroughly remove these threats."

"I have been very impressed by NovaShield 2.5 beta," said Paul Tatarsky, a consultant in computer security and intrusion detection. "Signature-based anti-malware products are increasingly coming up empty when dealing with cutting edge malware - NovaShield actually detects the system level activities of the most malicious malware. In addition to providing a new level of protection, Novashield is the first behavior-based anti-malware software to drastically reduce the number of false positives and it won't drag down the performance of the computer it is protecting."

Pricing and Availability Starting today, NovaShield AntiMalware 2.5 is available for a free 15-day trial and with a 1 or 2 year subscription. Introductory pricing for 1-year single-user license is $19.95. Introductory subscription price for 2-year single user license is $34.95. Family packs and 10-user small business packs will also be available. The product is available for download from www.novashield.com. About NovaShield NovaShield Inc. (www.NovaShield.com), founded by leading scientists at the University of Wisconsin, develops technology to detect and eliminate the next generation of malware threats on personal computers. Their breakthrough approach rapidly identifies previously unseen malware by using specification-based monitoring, a unique real-time approach for effectively detecting looming threats. The NovaShield team has developed the most advanced and accurate anti-malware product available to consumers and businesses with the best-in-class ability to find new threats such as drive-by-downloads, Trojans, botnets, keyloggers, and rootkits. Funded by two competitive grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and private investors, NovaShield is based in Madison, Wisconsin. ### Media Contact: Bret Clement Page One PR (for NovaShield) 303-462-3057 [email protected]