Friedrichs is a former Symantec research executive. He left the big company a year ago to start Palo Alto, Calif.-based Immunet. He decided to address something that the big vendors hadn't moved quickly enough to address: how to use the combination of cloud computing, collective intelligence and community-based trust networks to fight off the dramatic increase in malware threats.
The solution is clever. It leverages the idea of safety in numbers. Every time someone in the Immunet Protect network encounters a virus, the threat is identified, logged, and blocked on a centralized server platform. Instantaneously, because of the way Immunet works, everyone in the network can be protected from that identified virus.
"It's the idea of using the community to protect yourself and visa versa," Friedrichs said in an interview. "That's an idea that gave us an opportunity to do something better than the big companies. What helps us is that there is a sweeping shift in the nature of threats."
Security software companies are rare birds these days, as I noted after attending the recent Black Hat and Defcon security conferences recently. But Friedrichs assembled a team of antivirus veterans, including engineering executive Alfred Huger, that gave the startup a much better chance.
Friedrichs says the antivirus problem is out of control and that existing antivirus software catches less than 50 percent of today's threats, which often mutate to a slightly different form to avoid detection. Antivirus companies have to collect a virus, identify it, block it, and then distribute the block to all of its clients. But Friedrichs says it can take far too long to finish the process, and that doesn't work in an age of accelerating threats.
With Immunet, a computer is always connected to the Internet-based data center, or cloud, which Immunet leases as needed. The cloud always has updated virus detection. Whenever a computer is about to execute a file, it checks with the cloud to see if it is safe to proceed. You don't have to wait to download updates in order to be protected.
"Instead of pushing protection down to your computer in the form of thousands of files in a software update, we look at the cloud and determine if what you're about to do is dangerous or not," Friedrichs said.
Immunet also has a collective intelligence feature. Its a free product that sits alongside other antivirus protection. It can tap the virus detection of those applications and judge what is safe and what is not safe, based on the accumulated collective wisdom. Those judgements are coalesced in the cloud and, if they prove to be sound, are made available as protections to the rest of the Immunet community. The software thus runs alongside Symantec's Norton, McAfee and AVG brands of software.
The company is kicking off a beta program today at no cost for users. It will develop premium products in the future that will generate revenue, Friedrichs said. He declined to disclose the number of employees and exact funding details. The company has received a round of seed funding from angels. While McAfee and Symantec software is complementary, Friedrichs said his software competes directly with Panda Software, which also has a cloud-based security solution.
Friedrichs co-founded SecurityFocus, which made early-warning software for Internet attacks. Symantec acquired that business in 2002. He was also an executive at Secure Networks, which McAfee bought in 1998.
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