McAfee plans daily virus updates

Security specialist McAfee said Monday that it will start updating its virus-matching database every day, and that it will launch a customizable Web site that offers incident and threat information.

Vince Gullotto
VP, McAfee

Starting Feb. 24, the company will move from weekly updates of its virus definition data files, or DATs, to daily updates, said Vincent Gullotto, vice president of the antivirus emergency response team for the company. DATS make up the dictionary of viruses that McAfee's software recognizes.

"We had this request from our customers for quite some time, and we studied whether we could do it and do it effectively," Gullotto said.

Gullotto said the move is also a response to the increasing number of threats found on the Internet every day. On average, McAfee adds detection for 50 new threats each day.

In addition, the company announced plans to publish security incident and threat information to a customizable Web site, MyAvert. The site will be available in March, the company said.

The announcements came as McAfee prepared for Tuesday's kickoff of the RSA Security conference in San Francisco. Internet threats, and responses to them, will be a topic of the conference. Interest in that segment of the market has been fueled in part by Microsoft's recent purchase of three companies that address that niche. Most recently, the software giant announced plans to buy Sybari Software.

		Roundup Fretting about phishing Get all the news from the RSA Security Conference.

McAfee's announcements do not necessarily put the company ahead in service offerings.

Several of the company's competitors offer definition-file updates at least every day; Kaspersky Labs, for example, offers hourly updates. And MyAvert is a service designed to compete in some ways with the SecurityFocus Web portal, bought by McAfee's rival Symantec a few years ago, Gullotto said.

"We have so much information (in-house) today following our Foundstone acquisition and others, that we will be able to publish more interesting information over time," he said.

Mcafee enter the 1990's

Daily updates -- who would have guessed they could bring out this major new feature? Everyone else in this business has been doing nearer hourly updates for years now. Get with it!

[wrwjpn]

True???

"Everyone else in this business has been doing nearer hourly
updates for years now. Get with it!"

Wish M$ would do hourly updates like the rest of world then we
wouldn't have to worry about McAfee or other AV vendors.

[Al Johnsons]

guessed they could

<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.analogstereo.com/lexus_owners_manual.htm" target="_newWindow">http://www.analogstereo.com/lexus_owners_manual.htm</a>

Nuisance: Gotta be logged in as Admin

Shame on McAfee: their auto-updates only work if you're logged in as an administrative user. This flies in the face of one of the most fundamental security practices out there, which is to avoid logging on as an admin unless absolutely necessary.

You're wrong there.

The versions I've used (4.5.2 &#38; 7.1.0) both have the option to Autoupdate using the currently logged on user or another user you specify. If you normally log on as a general user just configure the autoupdate to run as your admin user.