Panda lofts its antivirus protection into the cloud

f the prospect of keeping important data out in the cloud still makes you slightly uneasy, you might get positively lightheaded at the thought of keeping your anti-malware protection up there. But Panda Cloud Antivirus, which entered beta recently, did a decent job of protecting a test system from the bad stuff -- without shoveling our data into the ether, and without slowing our system down.

Panda Security's an old hand at viruses, and under its old name (Panda Software) the Spanish firm has been toiling in the anti-malware trenches since the '90s. Around the turn of the century, the company began to shift away from the once ubiquitous signature-based model and to a combination of behavioral analysis and blocking, heuristics, and hardcore auditing. Still, the malware writers have gotten much smarter in the last decade too -- and they've gotten faster at getting their wares out to the public.

The latest iteration of Panda uses a crowdsourcing-style concept it's calling "Collective Intelligence" to speed up the process of identifying new threats. The user installs a thin Panda client on the system. Panda scans executables as they attempt to run -- no data files and nothing at rest, unless you specifically run a scan -- and notes the software's behavioral patterns, file traces, and the like. It creates what the company calls a "reverse signature" for each executable -- a partial cryptographic hash, in fact -- and sends it up to the cloud to confirm that the executable is clean.

The analysis and classification happens in the cloud, thus combining behavioral data from all the users (while anonymizing that of individuals) and automatically figures out whether it's seeing some heretofore unknown piece of malware. The "reverse signature" is checked, and the executable is flagged as known-good, known-bad, or not known. Panda reps estimate that the system can nail down a new breed of infection within about six minutes of its first appearance.

Our tests found Panda to be a tidy, well-behaved application that on its initial scan presented us with evidence of a nasty little keylogger that our previous antivirus somehow didn't notice. That initial scan took hours and hours on our Vista machine (with its 2/3-full 160 GB drive and 3 GB RAM). We had to jettison our previous antivirus package, which somehow hurt our feelings less after that festering iteration of TPE Civil War IV turned up, to load Panda. Connecting via proxy server was uneventful, requiring only that we provide the IP address and port in use. (If we'd been running Internet Explorer, Panda says the software could have retrieved that information automatically.)

After loading and that initial scan, though, Panda was utterly unobtrusive, only tapping us on the shoulder when something actually turned up. The software sees viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, adware, dialers, "jokes" (which the company defines as unwanted bits of code that don't seem to have a malicious payload but could confuse your machine into thinking it's infected), and cookies. The reports it provided were easy to parse (and save) and linked back to good information pages on Panda's site.