Tenacious Spyware Slips Past Weak ...

By Mark Hall

April 25, 2005 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - ... defenses offered by current technologies. Most antispyware tools apply a range of protections, such as URL filtering or signature analysis, but they catch less than 40% of the spyware that sneaks onto corporate computers, according to tests reported on
SpywareWarrior.net. The study, done last fall, showed that even the best scanners overlook more than one-fourth of the spyware on PCs. Blue Coat Systems Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., claims that its upcoming Spyware Interceptor appliance can dramatically improve your defense efforts. Chris Harget, a Blue Coat product manager, says the company has already surveyed 7.3 million Web sites to determine which ones carry spyware, be it knowingly or unknowingly. Blue Coat's engineers found "tens and tens of thousands of sites" rife with the pesky programs, Harget says. Interceptor will let end users navigate to a spyware-tainted site but doesn't allow the malware to slip through to their computers. It also recognizes when executable code has been hidden in a nonexecutable file such as a JPEG and stops the nefarious program from firing up. And because mobile users often pick up spyware outside the corporate network, Interceptor can stop the performance-sucking programs from contacting their home Web sites to report on what they have learned from infected machines. The appliance can handle 100 to 1,000 PCs on a network and is priced at $2,295, plus a subscription fee that starts at $695 for 100 users. It's due to ship on May 31.


Noel Barnard, CEO of HyPerformix Inc.

Predict an application's performance ...
... before you unleash it on your network. Software modeling technology that HyPerformix Inc. in Austin plans to release this week promises to help IT managers "predict the impact of change" that a new application will bring to a network, says CEO Noel Barnard. She notes that the Performance Designer tool can predict response times from an end user's perspective by applying more than 1,700 templates of the possible infrastructure configurations that applications will work within. You pick the appropriate template and run your code through its paces in a virtual IT world. Companies engaged in application consolidation work will particularly benefit, Barnard claims. Pricing starts at $100,000.
Track VoIP performance in real time ...
... to determine where the hang-ups are. With the ClearSight Distributed Analyzer, you can literally watch how your end users' voice-over-IP conversations are going. "The real-time flow of conversation views are broken down into a time-ladder diagram," says Bill Berkman, CEO of ClearSight Networks Inc. in Fremont, Calif. He means that the diagram

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