In honor of the 2011 RSA conference, we’re republishing an old ThreatFire blog post inspired by the 2008 conference:

When Michael Chertoff from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security spoke at the RSA 2008 conference, he said something extraordinarily intelligent:
“the best way to deal with an attack is to deal with it before it occurs, rather than respond to it after it has happened.”

This idea is at the core of the behavioral based protection we continue to build and improve upon in ThreatFire. The product doesn’t rely on signatures like traditional AV, so that attacks aren’t reacted to after they have happened, rather, they are proactively detected and prevented.

The idea should be pretty well planted by now that malware threats, when they are first released and most dangerous and active, can evade signature based detection and static solutions like firewalls quite effectively.