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  • Security Bites 108: Understanding white listing

Security Bites 108: Understanding white listing

Tom Murphy, chief strategy officer for Bit9, talks with CNET's Robert Vamosi about white listing.

  • by Robert Vamosi
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  • To put it simply, the concept of "white listing" is to define a set of software, a set of vendors, and allow only those trusted applications or files from those vendors to run on your machine. If a file or application is not approved, it will not run. This is the opposite of how we've blocked malware from our machines in the past.

    In 2007, Symantec detected more than 1 million viruses, with two-thirds created within the calendar year. Loading 1 million antivirus signatures or even a percentage of that if generic signatures are used is a pretty serious undertaking. The idea here is that maybe we should only be loading signatures for the good files.

    So far, the idea is only being implemented in the enterprise space. Still, it's a interesting idea. On the desktop it's already being used to stop spam, so why no

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