Spyware Doctor To Add Cyberhawk A/V Defense

By Neil J. Rubenking
Sydney-based PC Tools, purveyors of the popular Spyware Doctor antispyware utility, today announced their acquisition of Novatix Corporation.

Novatix's flagship product is Cyberhawk, a real-time behavior-based anti-malware program. According to PC Tools, "Cyberhawk's patent-pending ActiveDefense technology offers unsurpassed protection against both known and unknown viruses, worms, trojans, rootkits, buffer overflows and other forms of malware and provides effective protection against zero-day attacks."

Mike Kronenberg, chief executive of Novatix, will become chief technical officer of North American operations for PC Tools.

Spyware Doctor has long been a PC Magazine Editor's Choice for spyware protection, though the latest revision, Version 5.0 – a total rewrite with antivirus protection added – had some new-version problems. In testing, Cyberhawk Pro 2.0 was very effective at preventing malware from installing on a clean system. It doesn't remove found threats, just bottles them up so they can't do any harm. It's a good match for Spyware Doctor, which thoroughly cleans up the malware infestations it finds.


According to PC Tools chief executive Simon Claussen, "This new technology will help strengthen our zero-day coverage and improve our ability to detect emerging threats".

Kronenberg agreed. "We see this acquisition as a great fit for Novatix," he said. "PC Tools is a leader in the anti-spyware and anti-virus space. Our combined efforts will ensure that consumers get the best protection possible. PC Tools' broad reach in the consumer marketplace ensures our highly effective technology will have an even greater impact."

When asked when customers would reap the benefits of this acquisition, Michael Greene, PC Tools' vice president of product strategy, said immediately. "Consumers will start to recognize benefits right away." Greene said. "The information that comes in from the Cyberhawk community protection feature will feed into our ongoing analysis of new threats, and our Threat Expert technology will help speed up processing".

Cyberhawk Pro and the free Cyberhawk Basic will be backed by the PC Tools name and fully supported by PC Tools, Greene added.

Greene also declined to give a timetable on when both products would be integrated. "We don't have a hard date for integrating the technology into Spyware Doctor, but it is part of the long-term plan. Not only will we have signatures for the stuff we know about, we'll have behavioral technology for threats we haven't seen."



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