The virus scanning technology described in United States Patent 6,230,288, entitled Method of Treating Whitespace During Virus Detection, further distinguishes the company’s McAfee brand anti-virus products from products of other anti-virus vendors.
The patent broadly covers differing virus scanning arrangements and techniques, with an emphasis on performing whitespace processing on data being scanned. With Network Associates’ patented processes, traditional string search algorithms are less vulnerable to the vagaries of whitespace introduced into text based virus source code by different text editors.
Clearly this is a remarkable milestone in the development of virus detection strategies, said Gene Hodges, president of the McAfee product group of Network Associates. With this patent and our existing market presence, McAfee will continue to lead the field in virus detection.
One beneficial attribute of McAfee’s new technology is a heightened ability to distinguish the text found on web pages describing a virus, from the text found within a binary virus where the virus would not have its whitespace characters processed as whitespace because it would not be a text file. In contrast, the text found on a web page would be processed as text. Employing the new procedures and methods encompassed within the granted patent, the text from those two sources appear different because the procedures involved would have specially transformed the text version, causing it to no longer match what was found inside the binary file.
McAfee products protect e-businesses from security breaches and virus attacks. Network Associates has aggressively focused on the burgeoning mobile and wireless marketplace, developing the VirusScan Wireless family of products. The company is also actively addressing the service provider market through its McAfee ASaP brand offerings, which offer Internet security and virus protection. All McAfee products are backed by the world’s leading anti-virus research organization, McAfee AVERT (Anti-Virus Emergency Response Team), the team which first identified Melissa, Bubbleboy and Phage, the first wireless virus. For more information, McAfee can be reached at 800-338-8754 and on the Internet at http://www.mcafeeb2b.com or http://www.mcafeeasap.com.
