– The technology behind the first cloud-based security solutions on the market was first available to the public in 2007

– Collective Intelligence is a suite of technologies designed to automatically analyze, classify and disinfect all malware received at PandaLabs

– Thanks to Collective Intelligence, PandaLabs can process an average of 50,000 files a day, 35,000 of which are new strains of malware

– To analyze, classify and disinfect all files received in the first quarter of 2009 would have required 1,898 technicians and almost one million working hours.
 

It took less than one year to develop and implement the first version of Collective Intelligence, which Panda Security offered free to the market in 2007. This combination of technologies can scan, classify and disinfect all the files received every day at PandaLabs. Now, two years after the launch, this strategic initiative has enabled Panda to position itself as The Cloud Security Company, offering the market the first cloud-based security solution: Panda Cloud Antivirus (www.cloudantivirus.com ).

The existence of a highly profitable cyber-business model, orchestrated by criminal mafia, saw security laboratories inundated by an avalanche of new malware, with a tenfold increase in the number of new malware samples. This in turn made users more vulnerable, and there were only two possible solutions: rapidly expanding resources available to the laboratories in order to process these waves of malware manually, or automate processes and equip the teams adequately so that disinfection routines could be generated rapidly and automatically.

PandaLabs chose the most innovative yet most difficult path, deciding to front up to the challenge that no other company had taken on: The development of a system based on artificial intelligence which would be able not just to recognize new malware, but to learn and adapt to the new techniques of cyber-criminals. And that’s how Collective Intelligence came about. It was first available on the market in 2007, in the form of a small, free online scanner called NanoScan, detecting active malware in memory in just a few seconds. Given the highly positive reception from the market to this initiative, and the effectiveness of the technologies, it was decided to boost the detection capacity of the 2009 products with these cloud-based technologies. In April 2009, on the second anniversary, the user community around the world became, in effect, a vast global laboratory, thanks to the launch of an ultra-light cloud based antivirus: Panda Cloud Antivirus (www.cloudantivirus.com  ).

Panda’s Collective Intelligence system can correlate and process new malware in just six minutes, thanks to all the files received from the community every day. Sharing knowledge in this way results in far greater detection capacity available to all Panda clients. Collective Intelligence systems receive 50,000 new files every day, 35,000 of which are new malware. Of these, some 99.4% are processed automatically, leaving just 0.6% to be dealt with manually. The Collective Intelligence database is currently over 18,000 GB and holds around 26 million malware samples.

“If all this knowledge was stored on the user’s computer, we would be talking about the perfect antivirus, but there would be no room left for anything else on the system. That’s why Collective Intelligence is not just a response to the exponential increase in malware, but it also allows us to offer maximum detection capacity while reducing the impact on users’ computers”, explains Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs.

Collective Intelligence in numbers

– 50,000 files are received every day, 35,000 of these are new malware. 99.4% are processed automatically by Collective Intelligence, taking six minutes for each file on average.

– 52% of new malware processed by Collective Intelligence only stays in existence for 24 hours.

– In the first quarter of 2009, Collective Intelligence processed 4,474,350 files.

– To do this manually would have required 1,898 technicians and 926,347 working hours.

– The Collective Intelligence database is now 18,000 GB or 148 billion bits.

– If this amount of information were in text format, it would be equivalent to 727,373 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, with almost 33 billion pages.

– Laid end-to-end, these printed pages would stretch for over 9 million kilometers, the equivalent of going to the moon and back twelve times.

– And if we had to send this information across a standard ADSL connection, it would take 1,045 days.

You can find more information and the full history of Collective Intelligence at www.pandalabs.com  .