Over the past few months since the release of Prevx Edge, we have received a lot of great feedback. Edge uses our latest implementation of in-the-cloud technology which is the final result of years of experience using this community database technology. This has helped many people by intercepting and blocking new infections days, weeks, before they could have been manually analyzed and a signature would have been added manually by an analyst.

We recently came across one of the best results so far of our new community protection while we were monitoring the spread of a variant of the Conficker worm. This worm has overloaded the local networks of many companies and a variant of this worm, also known as Downadup, has lately been the topic of many media articles.

This variant started spreading during the last week of December, which is the best period a malware writer could choose to spread their creature because of many security companies having at east some of their staff on holiday.

We received an alarm of possible new widespread malware coming from our monitoring services, showing Edge consistently blocking a strange new infection.

The worm was, at that time, almost undetected by most security companies and now, after even two weeks, we're still seeing many press releases showing the isolation, analysis and detection of this variant.

While we agree the worm has been complicated to analyze because of obfuscated code and because of the number of PCs it succesfully infected, we must underline how our in-the-cloud technology has been able to intercept and block this new infections weeks before other security companies even isolated it.

Since the first release of this new infection, Prevx Edge has heuristically blocked every variant. Our analysis later added a signature but before this, all of our Edge users were completely protected the instant that the threat surfaced.

The malware authors behind Conficker wrote in code to explicitly block the Prevx website from infected computers. This shows us that we're doing something right! Our database was able to automatically determine the intent of the Conficker worm and variants, showing that centralized, community threat analysis is not only a useful tool, but a necessary part of complete computer security.