Users turn from boxed software to Web for virus, spam remedies

08/09/99

By Doug Bedell / The Dallas Morning News

An emerging breed of Web sites are providing computer users a new way to give their hard drives the latest virus scans, performance check-ups and other services without the hassle of lengthy downloads.

Online diagnostics for cyber diseases - viruses and other forms of mischievous to malicious code that can plague computers - are the most visible in this new genre from the Internet. As more computers are linked to the online world, manufacturers are moving delivery of many programs - including software to scan for viruses, filter out spam and set Web-surfing parameters for children - from the desktop to Web.

Right now, most of these services are free, although several software companies plan to charge if the concept catches on. Others may seek personal information so they can target individuals through direct e-mail marketing.

Many require computers running Windows 95/98 and the latest browsers from Netscape and Microsoft because the services use newfangled ActiveX controls or browser plug-ins to get a look at visitors' drives. Similar applications for Macintosh systems are not yet available.

Experts believe these offerings will quickly spread.

"There's a fundamental shift happening in the industry," says Sunil Paul, chief executive officer of Bright Light Technologies, whose Bright Mail eliminates spam before the unsolicited mass mailings reach home and office computers. "Applications that had run exclusively on the desktop can now be run well" from the Web.

In an era when viruses such as the recently unleashed Melissa can roar through a computer network causing drastic damage, catching problems before they reach each computer can mean deep savings for corporate clients. Many of the Web products available free to home users were designed to entice corporate technology managers and Internet service providers into buying broader versions intended for servers.

Several factors have contributed to the expansion of such programs. Free Internet-based e-mail, personal schedulers and other services have proved popular among home and office computer users. Also, storing programs and other information at a centralized location makes it easier for users of laptops, personal digital assistants and other mobile devices to keep track of or access that material remotely.

Few pundits suggest that the usual ways of using programs - on hard drives and installed from floppies, CD-ROMs or downloads - will be outdated soon. Many, however, predict that cost and convenience will lead to a strong demand for alternatives delivered from the Web.

"Certain vendors are making a lot of money selling boxed software, and that's not going away," says Dan Schrader, vice president of new technologies for Trend Micro, whose HouseCall product scans for viruses from the Web. "We just aren't going to focus on selling protection for Win95 PC desktops at discount houses."

Virus scans

Trend Micro (www.antivirus.com) and McAfee (www.mcafee.com) are in the vanguard.

Both sites use the latest list of known viruses to examine hard disks for infections. While the companies advise users to scan for bugs using programs on their desktops, the online products can quickly detect problems and often fix them without having to update programs loaded onto their PCs.

Like most of these new services, McAfee requires use of Windows 95/98 with Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher. Plug-ins - programs from the Web that browsers recognize automatically - are available at the sites for Netscape, too.

Other services from the McAfee Web site, advertised extensively on radio and television, include those that will clean hard drives, speed up your system, find updates of software it sees on your PC and check for Year 2000 compliance.

Trend Micro, maker of the desktop software PC-cillin, is conducting 400,000 scans a month for Web visitors whose computers are equipped with Windows 95 and the Netscape or Internet Explorer browsers, versions 3.0 or higher.

"HouseCall makes a great second opinion," says Mr. Schrader. "We've got a lot of people coming in and saying, 'I want to know right now if I have a virus.' It's great for that, but the key to catching viruses is real-time scanning on the desktop. This shouldn't be viewed as a total replacement."

These sorts of scanning services carry the advantage of speed. "With something like Melissa, it spreads so fast, end users can't update themselves quickly enough to catch it," Mr. Schrader says.

Allowing Trend Micro and McAfee to see the contents of hard drives has raised security concerns among some users. Both companies, however, say their only interests are in delivering services and showing how they work. Mr. Schrader says Trend Micro discontinued a feature that automatically extracted questionable files from hard disks for further analysis.

"Customers said, 'No, we're not going to send our data automatically to you; we don't trust you for that,' " he says. "That quick feedback is one of the advantages of the Web."

The real value becomes apparent if Internet service providers install virus scanners for their servers, Mr. Schrader says.

To that end, the maker of the popular Norton AntiVirus software is developing a product to keep hundreds of desktops at a time running properly. The Digital Immune System by Symantec (www.symantec.com) is to incorporate virus detection technology from IBM and a suite of intelligent tools.

Fighting viruses from the Web instead of entirely from the desktop is promising enough that numerous companies are spending a lot on the model.

"There are maybe a few hundred ISPs who provide 95 percent of the connectivity out there," Mr. Schrader says. "If we can get those people running this, you can easily stop 85 or 90 percent of the virus infections."

Battling spam

In July, Bright Light Technologies introduced another Web-based remedy for spam, an increasingly annoying side effect of online life.

Spam saps time from home and workplace computer users alike, as well as space from corporate mail servers. It also can carry harmful viruses. So pervasive is the problem that pressure is mounting on Congress and state legislatures to combat it.

Spam-filtering software for the desktop has become a popular download across the Internet. But keeping filters updated is time-consuming for both home users and businesses.

And, because mass e-mail companies can move and change names frequently to avoid the ire of their own ISPs, such programs are not aways effective.

Bright Light's bright idea is to sift for spam before people download it. Those with standard POP3 mailboxes hosted by ISPs can sign up for free to sample the service, which the company markets to corporations and service providers.

Bright Mail (www.brightmail.com) allows visitors to assign its servers as intermediaries, or filtering proxies. When reconfigured, users' e-mail is dragged through Bright Mail's Spam Wall on the way to the home or work desktop. In the process, e-mail addresses are checked against a constantly updated list of spammers.

If e-mail comes from an address contained in the Spam Wall database, the message is shunted into a holding bin. Users can check the culled mail to make sure it's all unwanted for up to 30 days.

"This product is about saving you time," says Mr. Paul, Bright Light's CEO. "A lot of people have taken it upon themselves to create filters. But there's a big frustration in deciding what's spam and what should be deleted."

Bright Mail's servers are under contract to scan 14 million commercial accounts already. Mr. Paul says about 100,000 individuals have signed on to have their POP3 mail filtered.

If enough users from a single e-mail domain apply for the service, the company will attempt to sign up the ISP for a licensing fee, he says. A recent Gartner Group survey of 13,000 e-mail users showed that a growing percentage blame ISPs for their spam headaches.

"In what has become an Internet tradition, we hope that satisfied users of free Bright Mail will encourage their ISPs and employers to implement commercial versions of the service," Mr. Paul says.

Internet filters

A company called N2H2 (www.N2H2.com), which this month had an initial public offering of stock, is touting another service for parents and schools concerned about inappropriate material on the Internet.

Used by about 8 million students in 8,000 U.S. schools, the company's Bess filtering system uses a proxy server to screen Internet traffic using a database of banned sites.

With its customizable filter, system administrators can block access to Internet sites in more than 30 categories, among them pornography, hate/discrimination, violence, drugs and chat areas.

When a blocked site is requested, Bess provides an index of educational sites in addition to offering a function to continue the search. The product also permits different filters to be active at different times. Having Bess on a server allows school district administrators to control what gets through to libraries and classrooms.

N2H2 is marketing products to ISPs as well, which would allow them to offer filtered access to the Internet for young people by subscription. Because the product resides on a server, filtering cannot be disabled at individual workstations without a teacher's or parent's password. N2H2 says updates of its database of blocked sites are downloaded daily to customers' servers.

The company demonstrates its technology at www.searchopolis.com. Searchopolis is an Internet search engine that filters results using the same databases used in N2H2's educational and ISP products.

N2H2's products, like those for spam- and virus-scanning, don't need constant tweaking because they are automatically updated from servers. The same can't be said for software loaded on individual hard drives. Internet Explorer 5's Content Advisor, for example, contains the same sort of tools but must be activated and deactivated during each online session.

Some free-speech advocates have criticized N2H2's approach, challenging its use of server-based filters for public libraries, in particular. However, like the purveyors of other services or products piped to computers from the Web, N2H2 president Peter Nickerson says that catching problems before they reach the desktop eliminates many of the Internet's annoyances and dangers.

"Though some poor filtering products now exist, filtering has gone through an extensive evolution and is not only good at protecting children but also well-received and in high demand," Mr. Nickerson recently told members of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade and Consumer Protection.

"Customers have requested and demanded changes to filtering products and asked for new features. Most filtering firms have responded by improving their offerings and adding new products."

Send e-mail for Doug Bedell to dbedell@dallasnews.com.

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Trend Micro (www.antivirus.com) and McAfee (www.mcafee.com) use the latest list of known viruses to examine hard disks for infections. As in most of these products, McAfee requires use of Windows 95 or 98 with Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher. Plug-ins for Netscape are available at the sites to function with that browser, too.

The PC CheckUp Center by McAfee (www.mcafee.com/centers/pc_checkup/) also provides hard drive cleaning, an optimizer for PC performance, a finder for software updates of programs it sees you've installed and a Y2K compliance check.

Bright Mail (www.brightmail.com) allows visitors to assign its servers as intermediaries, or filtering proxies. Users can sign up to use the Bright Mail service free. Bright Mail servers, which are kept up to date on the latest sources of spam, can be used to pull unwanted commercial e-mail from mail before it is downloaded to the desktop.