I’ve spent a good portion of my career in the security market and when I run across market confusion, it’s hard to ignore. Clearly, this is the case with application control/whitelisting – a hotly debated topic for the last 10 years. Many of us have varying points of view, which is exactly why we developed this site. 

Changing IT security landscape

According to the vulnerability statistics from CERT in 1990, we averaged fewer than 25 unique instances of malware per month at that time. With that low run rate of vulnerabilities, security companies could easily keep up creating defensive signatures for signature based Anti Virus (AV) to defend network environments. Today, as we approach 2011, we are seeing more than 1,500,000 individual instances of malware every month.  Do the math – the growth rate is nearly incomprehensible.

Whether we like it or not, endpoint security is undergoing the beginning of a big shift. Recent consolidation signals the beginning of a transition in the way we provide endpoint protection and the role traditional blacklist antivirus plays to that end. Endpoint protection, instead of relying on an after-the-fact technology that defeats threats by having seen them and distributing signatures, is moving toward a foundation of application whitelisting for prevention and application intelligence with blacklisting playing an auditing and cleaning role.