Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 Delivers Unrivaled Security with Fastest Performance

Powered by Insight and built for virtual environments, new solution brings faster, more powerful security to businesses of all sizes 

Dubai, UAE. – Feb. 16, 2011 – Symantec Corp (NASDAQ: SYMC) today announced new versions of Symantec Endpoint Protection and Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition (currently in beta), providing businesses of all sizes with advanced protection while improving system performance. Complete with advanced features to secure virtual infrastructures and powered by Insight, Symantec’s award-winning community and cloud-based reputation technology, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 is designed to detect and block sophisticated new threats earlier and more accurately than any other security product.  
Click to Tweet: Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 provides advanced protection and improves system performance: http://bit.ly/ezO50j
Security threats have become more sophisticated and also more widespread, creating a challenge for traditional signature-based security solutions. Last year, attackers unleashed more than 286 million distinct malicious programs, an average of more than nine new threats every second of every day. This explosion in malware scope and complexity is due in large part to the proliferation of easy-to-use attack toolkits—such as Zeus—which lower the barrier of entry in cybercrime. These toolkits enable hackers to continuously generate new mutated malware variants each targeting a different victim, making traditional discovery and fingerprinting of these threats nearly impossible. According to Symantec’s Attack Toolkits and Malicious Websites Report, at least 61 percent of threat activity can be attributed to attack toolkits.  As these toolkits grow in popularity, the trend towards millions of narrowly distributed, high impact threats will continue. Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 leverages Insight to provide unmatched protection against this new threat landscape.
Key Benefits

• Unrivaled Security: Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 blocks new and unknown threats missed by traditional signature, heuristic, behavioral and HIPS-based security solutions. All of the product’s security engines are now reputation-enabled, leveraging Insight’s online reputation database to identify and block malware attacks. Symantec’s Insight has analyzed the anonymous software adoption patterns from more than 175 million customer computers to automatically derive highly accurate security ratings for more than 2.5 billion unique software files - Insight has ratings for virtually every software file, good or bad in existence. In addition, SONAR 3, the world’s first hybrid behavioral-reputation engine, blocks zero-day and highly targeted threats based on their joint behavior-reputation profile. As part of a commissioned test, the leading security testing organization, AV-Test.org recently compared a number of major endpoint security products on their effectiveness in blocking new threats as well as cleaning up pre-existing infections. Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 (Beta) received the top score against all tested competitors in both categories. 

• Fastest Performance: Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 leverages cloud-based community intelligence to reduce the overhead of virus scanning by as much as 70 percent by using Symantec Insight to automatically identify and whitelist trusted, high-reputation files, resulting in fewer, faster, and smarter scans.  The new, Insight-driven compatible scan engine is also designed to do most of its work while computers are idle. In the latest roundup of PassMark Software’s performance test of enterprise and small business security solutions, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 reported the fastest scan speed and was found to be twice as fast as the average security solution. Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 also used the least memory, 57 percent less memory usage than the average security solution.

• Built for Virtual Environments: Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 offers comprehensive defense against all types of attacks and is optimized for performance on virtual systems. Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 can whitelist baseline images, maintain a local Insight cache, randomize scans and updates, and automatically identify and manage virtual clients. This is above and beyond the performance improvements gained with Insight. Together these innovations dramatically reduce the load on virtual hosts, alleviating  ‘AV Storms’/concurrent scans from bogging down system resources, and allowing for faster, more responsive systems, which can in turn support greater density of virtual instances. Symantec is working closely with VMware to take full advantage of virtualization awareness and introspection capabilities based on VMware vShield™ technology and Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 is the first step along the optimization path for virtual environments.

• Small Business Edition: Leveraging Insight and Sonar 3, Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition offers enterprise-class threat detection technologies and performance improvements with simple to use features such as installation wizard, pre-configured policy settings and automated notifications and reports for small business customers. Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition meets small business needs with the fastest, most effective anti-malware capabilities in the industry. Small businesses will have peace of mind that their data is safe from cybercriminals, so that they can stay focused on growing their business.

Beta Registration and Availability
Presently, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 is in an invitation-only beta and is expected to be available for public beta in April 2011. The new versions of Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 are scheduled to be generally available in Summer 2011 and can be purchased through Symantec’s worldwide network of value-added authorized resellers, distributors and systems integrators or directly.  For more information on Symantec Endpoint Protection and to register for public beta, please click here.