Prevent home network intrusions

Prevx today launched a host intrusion prevention system for consumers. Prevx Home Version 2.0 includes features to protect home PCs from "malicious zero-day or unknown attacks that get past existing security solutions, such as anti-virus software and firewalls," the company said in a statement.

The software is available as a free download from the Prevx Web site. The company said its software eliminates the "security gap" between the time that a network worm, malicious code or spyware is launched, and when security vendors are able to release the updated signatures to counter the threat. The Prevx system uses a behavior-based approach to monitor systems and block the execution of suspicious activities, including buffer overflows and unapproved attempts to write to the registry.

There's a reason the software is free, however. The company said users of Prevx Home 2.0 will automatically become part of an early warning network, with details of all blocked attacks being sent anonymously to Prevx, which will enable instantaneous identification of emerging threats. The company said it will not collect any registration data from users, and has purged all the details of version 1.0 users from its databases. They also said the process for collecting the attack data is being done independently by security experts at London's Royal Holloway University.