McAfee Readies Enhanced Antivirus OfferingMcAfee Readies Enhanced Antivirus Offering

Antivirus software maker McAfee Inc. is expected to make a major enhancement to its VirusScan software in the first week of March. The new version, Enterprise 7.0, will include a worm-killing feature--the company says the worm killer will scan memory on demand for worms and Trojans as well as for viruses--and will kill malicious activity.

While not entirely new, memory-resident worms such as Code Red and Slammer seem to be becoming more popular among virus writers, and more virulent. Slammer nearly saturated its potential targets in 10 minutes, by some estimates. "When you're talking about something that fast, there's no way any vendor can push a signature out fast enough to stop it," says Eric Hemmendinger, research director of information security for Aberdeen Group.

McAfee says Enterprise 7.0 users also will be able to profile which types of processes get scanned for viruses, based on risk. For instance, automated backups may not be scanned for viruses while E-mail would always be scanned for potentially malicious software.

Pricing wasn't immediately available. VirusScan Enterprise 7.0 will be available in early March.