Kaspersky granted US patent for antivirus hardware

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 16 February 2010 16:08

Business IT - Security

Security vendor Kaspersky Lab has been granted a US patent for an antivirus device that prevents malware from being written to a disk.

One of the problems with a software approach to malware protection is that privilege escalation exploits can allow malicious code to work around or even disable the software.

Kaspersky has proposed a device that is installed between the hard drive and the rest of the system, blocking malicious activity according to an internal antivirus database.

It could be implemented as a physically separate device or as an integrated part of the disk controller.

The company claims this approach is particularly effective against rootkits.

Inventor Oleg Zaitsev, Kaspersky Lab's technology expert, said "a hardware-based antivirus solution has a distinct advantage over conventional AV solutions because it monitors all attempts to access a memory device while remaining inaccessible to malware. This is critical for fighting such sophisticated threats as rootkits and bootkits."

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