As some people know, we've been in the process of making our 'lights-out' security solution available for the consumer market over the last couple of months. While we're not ready to release it to the general public, we have been posting new betas at www.determina.com/consumer recently, and the latest rev is significant.
For one thing, we have changed the GUI so that it is catchy and 'consumer-friendly'. Our enterpriese products have a great interface, but they are oriented toward somebody who is a security administrator at a Fortune 1000 company. It's assumed that they know alot about security events, are managing 1000's of machines, etc. You can't and don't want to do that in the consumer marketplace. Hence we've introduced a new GUI that allows a minimum amount of control, and only the essential features.
Second, and the reason for this post is something called SPF or System Protection Factor. One of the biggest problems that normal folks (me included) have is keeping up with patches from multiple ISV's. Microsoft does an okay job with auto-update, but even there if your PC is a year or so old, you may not be getting all of the latest patches and you won't know it. Worse yet, there are a bunch of other ISV's who put out patches, and you may not have them installed either. Lastly, there are always the 0-days to worry about that don't have patches.
SPF computes a single number to indicate how vulnerable you are. First, it tries to figure out which known vulnerabilities are still active on your machine. Second, it shows how much Determina's VPS protection would help if it is installed and activated.
When put together SPF and VPS protection give you extra knowledge and provide you with great protection against vulnerabilites in the software on your desktop that hackers might exploit without your knowledge.
For one thing, we have changed the GUI so that it is catchy and 'consumer-friendly'. Our enterpriese products have a great interface, but they are oriented toward somebody who is a security administrator at a Fortune 1000 company. It's assumed that they know alot about security events, are managing 1000's of machines, etc. You can't and don't want to do that in the consumer marketplace. Hence we've introduced a new GUI that allows a minimum amount of control, and only the essential features.
Second, and the reason for this post is something called SPF or System Protection Factor. One of the biggest problems that normal folks (me included) have is keeping up with patches from multiple ISV's. Microsoft does an okay job with auto-update, but even there if your PC is a year or so old, you may not be getting all of the latest patches and you won't know it. Worse yet, there are a bunch of other ISV's who put out patches, and you may not have them installed either. Lastly, there are always the 0-days to worry about that don't have patches.
SPF computes a single number to indicate how vulnerable you are. First, it tries to figure out which known vulnerabilities are still active on your machine. Second, it shows how much Determina's VPS protection would help if it is installed and activated.
When put together SPF and VPS protection give you extra knowledge and provide you with great protection against vulnerabilites in the software on your desktop that hackers might exploit without your knowledge.