There is hardly a single company in the world, which is not threatened by the virus attacks and spam email messages. Such attacks may result in significant financial losses for the company, especially where the serious IT infrastructure is used. At the same time, the endless stream of security fixes and patches for the antivirus software, which must be managed and deployed, may put an enormous burden on the IT staffs.

Hewlett Packard, one of the leading innovators of IT technologies, has presented recently its new technology to fight viruses - the HP Virus Throttle. The company believes that the most effective way to reduce threats, protect privacy and maintain business continuity is to build a security unit into every part of the IT systems. The HP Virus Throttle is a new feature of the ProCurve Switch 5300xl for ProLiant servers and the HP BladeSysetm architecture, which stops virulent worms at the entry points of the IT infrastructure.

The HP Virus Throttle software detects a worm-type virus activity by looking for a client PC attempting to connect with an unusual number of other clients in a short period of time. If virus traffic is suspected, the switch can slow down or block its ability to reach out to the rest of the network. It greatly slows down or stops the spread of the virus, giving the network managers time to clean the virus from the client computer before the worm has a chance to bring the entire network down.

The HP Virus Throttle solution uses the key feature of viruses' behavior for detecting the virus itself. When a virus or worm attacks, one of the first things it does is to spread itself as fast and far as it can. Virus Throttle antivirus software continually monitors systems and, when there is a sudden, suspicious burst of activity, the request is either completely blocked, slowed down or "throttled back" to give the network managers some time to respond and to act in correspondence with the attack type.

One of the most interesting and valuable features of this technology from Hewlett Packard is that it is capable to fight effectively not only with the already-known viruses, but also with the newly appeared ones. Most of the antivirus software products are based on the so-called signature files of the viruses, which are stored in the special databases and the antivirus constantly compares the unknown files with the signatures from the database; if the matching occurs, the system will mark such file as "virus" and will block it. Nowadays, the problem is that the new viruses appear almost constantly and it is necessary to update the antivirus software database a couple of times per day to stay protected from the newly appeared viruses.

Here, the HP Virus Throttle solution offers a completely new and unique approach to the virus detection - the software monitors not the file signatures but the activity of the system; that is why the new antivirus software from Hewlett Packard will react in seconds to stop the virus attack, even in case it is a brand-new type of virus.