Symantec, McAfee Launch Enterprise Anti-Spyware Tools At RSA

Symantec and McAfee leveraged the RSA Conference Monday to launch enterprise-wide battles against spyware. Both major security vendors touted new enterprise anti-spyware solutions.

As recently as a year ago, attention to spyware was low on the enterprise totem pole, said David Friedlander, a senior analyst with Forrester. Not so now. In 2005, he predicted, 65 percent of U.S. companies will purchase or upgrade anti-spyware software, making the category the most-purchased security technology for the year.

"There's a tremendous opportunity in anti-spyware," said Friedlander. "Spyware ranks fourth out of a list of nine possible threats to the organization." And while the vast majority of firms claim to have anti-spyware software in play -- 80 percent by the results of Friedlander's research -- many of them are using free, limited-use tools such as Ad-Aware and Spybot.

"Most companies that have deployed anti-spyware software haven't deployed it throughout the enterprise," said Friedlander. "Instead, they've put the software primarily on laptops that leave the network, or on a desktop when they realize that system has a [spyware] problem."

That leaves a lot of room for big-time, big-name security suppliers like Symantec and McAfee, and down the road, Microsoft, too, said Friedlander. "The one thing customers have said they're most interested in having is a single anti-virus/anti-spyware scanning engine."That plays right into Symantec's hands. On Monday, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company said it would add anti-spyware detection, deletion, and repair to its AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.0 and Client Security 3.0 when they roll out next month. Key to its spyware strategy, said Kevin Haley, Symantec's group product manager for its desktop security line, is that the anti-spyware functions will be handled by the existing anti-virus scanning engine.

Symantec's stressing that double-punch to existing and potential customers, said Haley. Not only will anti-spyware scanning and repair not add any additional footprint to the AV products, but the same infrastructure -- from its global network of honeypots to its automatic update of definition files -- will be used to sniff out threats and deliver protection.

"We're leveraging all the pieces of our anti-virus," said Haley. "We already have a pretty solid management structure for AV, for instance, so that there's no need for companies to go to third party solutions. And we're not going to charge extra for anti-spyware. It'll just be an extension of what we already do [in anti-virus]."

Rival McAfee also used the forum of RSA, which opened Monday in San Francisco and runs through Friday, to tout its enterprise-grade anti-spyware software.

Previously announced as an add-on module to its anti-virus platforms and even available in beta form, McAfee's Anti-Spyware Enterprise will ship March 2, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company announced at the conference.The new tool integrates with McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 7.1 and 8.0i, said McAfee, and can be deployed and managed with the company's ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) in large firms, and ProtectionPilot in small- and medium-sized companies.

Like Symantec's offering -- and virtually every other anti-spyware platform, McAfee's will provide real-time defenses that keep known and suspected spyware from installing, and sweep already-in-place spyware from a system during scheduled scans.

One major difference, however, is that McAfee will charge extra for its anti-spyware layer. According to a spokeswoman's example prices, enterprises will pay between $6.60 per seat per year (for installations of 10,000+ seats) and $20 per seat per year (for 26 or fewer seats) for Anti-Spyware Enterprise. Those prices will be in addition to the per-seat costs for VirusScan Enterprise.

The trend, said Forrester's Friedlander, is clearly one towards a merging of anti-virus and anti-spyware technologies under one software "roof." That's what enterprises are clamoring for.

"It's not likely that we'll see stand-alone anti-spyware a year from now," he said. "That doesn't mean there won't be some spyware-only solutions, but they're be marginal."While that trend -- and the desire to implement virus and spyware detection and deletion by a single scanning engine -- "makes the future attractive for Symantec and McAfee," said Friedlander, "Microsoft is hardly a dark horse here."

Its purchase of anti-spyware vendor Giant Company Software in December 2004, the 2003 acquisition of anti-virus technology from GeCAD, and the most recent buy of Sybari, a provider of anti-virus and anti-spam management tools, gives Microsoft everything it needs to follow in the footsteps of Symantec and McAfee. "There's certainly the potential for Microsoft to disrupt Symantec's and McAfee's plans," Friedlander said.

One potential stumbling block to Microsoft's effort, however, will be the chore of combining the scanning engines of GeCAD and Giant into a single piece of software. "They've got their work cut out for them to integrate those engines," Friedlander said.