Sophos releases antivirus for Vista

Robert Forsyth Managing Director for Sophos Asia Pacific, told SC Magazine today that Sophos always planned to have the technology available for Vista’s release, which he said occurred overnight, a claim which was later denied by Microsoft.

Sophos Anti-Virus version 6.5 protects against viruses, spyware, adware, potentionally unwanted applications (PUAs) and automatically updates every 10 minutes.

Forsyth said that earlier issues around Microsoft’s PatchGuard security product, which blocked security vendors from Vista’s kernel code, had not affected the roll out of the product.

“We didn’t have a problem because we approached [Vista security] in a different way. We get to files before they reach the kernel, before a file is unpacked; we look into it and analyse it,” he said.

“It looks around the kernel and analyses the behaviour of files. We have 'behavioural genotype protection', which looks at pre-exection rather than execution.

The product is available now.

antivirusforreleasessecuritysophosvista