Network Associates granted patent for virus technology

NAI comes up with a new toy for over-worked virus hunters

Network Associates today announced that the US Patent and Trademark Office has granted them a virus scanning technology patent for its McAfee AV software range. The patented anti-viral technology works by transforming the text found on a scanned web page, or text contained within a virus, into a format the engine can more accurately understand. After removing whitespaces, gaps in the text that are different in the code of a virus' makeup to that of a text file, the software returns a match with the original. Otherwise, it is taken as evidence of the presence of a bug. Jack Clark, a spokesman for Network Associates subsidiary McAfee, described the patent as another step forward in their generic detection method. He added: "It simply allows us to be more accurate in detecting VBS scripts and other text-based infections we see in the wild." The patent, No. 6,230,288, is entitled Method of treating whitespace during virus detection.