CYBER criminals are getting stronger by the day and their methods are getting more sophisticated and devious every day. However, major global provider of security, storage and systems management solutions has responded to the growing threat of cyber crimes.

In a recent press briefing, Symantec Asia-Pacific vice president for consumer business David Freer said governments and organizations must be more vigilant because cyber crime is growing around the world. “Cyber crime has surpassed illegal drug trafficking as a criminal money maker. Every three seconds an identity is stolen. We cannot ignore the fact that cyber criminals are now destroying lives rather than computers,” said Freer.

In fact, Symantec blocked an average of more than 245 million attempted malicious code attacks across the globe each month during 2008. Phony-emails, fake websites and online ads trick innocent victims into divulging personal data like social security and credit card numbers.

In response, Freer said Symantec has recently rolled out Norton 2010 to meet the growing threats of cyber crime based on new security model called Quorum. Interestingly, Freer said the best cyber criminals have in their arsenal the ability to create unique pieces of malware at an alarming rate which, in turn, is used against the criminals.

“With the introduction of the powerful new reputation-based security in Norton 2010, we have once again, raised the bar for Internet security and set new standard for the industry. Harnessing the power of millions of users united against cyber crime, the faster, safer and smarter Norton 2010 gives consumers the power to ‘deny’ digital dangers and ‘allow’ a safe online experience,” Freer pointed out.

Freer said fighting cyber criminals in the current period requires a higher degree of intelligence and vigilance because they are intensely writing and then rewriting new and unique pieces of malware to enable them to go under the radar for as long as possible.

With the creation of Quorum, Symantec Asia-Pacific regional consumer product marketing manager David Hall said the capability of Quorum of pinpointing the uniqueness of a file and its attributes helps the company detect the new malware. Quorum, a three-year project undertaken by Symantec, tracks files and applications and dozens of their attributes such as their age, download source, digital signature and prevalence.

In his presentation, Hall said Quorum was developed because the traditional network security is not effective anymore. In expounding his point, Hall said the projected more than 200 million attacks per month is a proof that the old networks are useless in these new forms of attacks delivered through the Web. 

“Most of these have never been seen before. People must be aware that pure-based signature approach cannot keep up with the number of threats,” he said.

Quorum’s attributes are combined using complex algorithms to determine a reputation of file. As a file is distributed across the Internet and these attributes change, Quorum updates the reputation of the file. According to Hall, this was made possible by the heuristics developed by Symantec engineers.

According to viruscenter.zks.freedom.net/ heuristics is a “rule-based method of identifying new viruses.” Heuristics has been acknowledged that it is not fooled by a new variant of an existing virus.

The beauty of Quorum, according to Hall, is the architecture enables all their other techniques to be more effective without sacrificing accuracy. With the global presence of Norton Data Center, Hall said users are able to leverage Norton community of almost 30 million users.

Hall stressed the reputation is quite important when a new file is around because it is a potential threat and traditional defenses are not likely to detect it.

As a file is distributed across the Internet and these attributes change, Hall said Quorum updates the reputation of the file. He said updating is important to ensure consistent vigilance on potential malware.

IN PHOTO -- DAVID HALL, regional consumer product marketing manager at Symantec Asia-Pacific, introduces the Norton 2010 Internet Security suite during a product launch held at Mandarin Hotel. RHOY COBILLA