In the past couple of months, whitelisting has been in the news through multiple different avenues. We at CoreTrace feel that the raising awareness that blacklist-based antivirus simply can no longer protect PCs is passing a critical point—a point that is going to lead businesses and eventually consumers to a whitelisting model that can prevent infection, not just detect and clean up the infection after the fact. Here is a look at some key news around this area:
- May 15th – McAfee Acquires Solidcore
- June 20th – Microsoft announced the debut of its free antivirus public beta, Microsoft Security Essentials
- June 23th – CoreTrace redefines endpoint protection with the Bouncer 5.0 announcement and two key advances.
- First, it extended protection to prevent critical memory attacks.
- Second, it continued is mission to overcome the biggest challenge for whitelisting solutions, the ability to dynamically add new applications or upgrades, by extending it’s patent pending “Trusted Change” feature—including the industry’s first ability to allow users to safely install trusted applications in a browser.
- June 26th – Brian Prince of eWeek poses the question, “Will the Antivirus Market Be Challenged or Complemented by Whitelisting”
Much of the discussion has centered around whether or not blacklist-based antivirus will be replaced or complimented by whitelisting, but there is relatively no discussion of whether or not whitelisting is important to the future of desktop security. Starting next week we are going to put forth a series of blogs that describe our vision for a rational transition to whitelisting. This series will address the major questions about the stages of the transition and an approach to solving the key challenges for application whitelisting.