Daiwabo Co., Ltd. has developed "antivirus nonwoven fabrics" with the effect of reducing the amount of bird flu virus by 99.99% every minute in cooperation with Mochigase Electric Co., Ltd. and Tottori University. This product is a new material produced by a new manufacturing process to fix antivirus agents with a special finish to natural mineral "dolomite" onto the surface of fibers. Reportedly, this new product has considerably improved functionality and durability in comparison with conventional processes.

Grisoft Software, the developer of A VG Internet security products, has introduced a free product aimed at detecting and removing rootkits. Rootkits, a specific malware type which hides in other applications or in a computer's operating system kernel, allow malicious applications to collect passwords and sensitive data from the infected computer without user knowledge. This collected personal information can be used to create spam from the infected computer as well as other criminal activities.

The pilot service is said to offer F-Secure's Mobile Anti-Virus solution and is available through Orange World. Orange said that an increasing number of viruses are affecting mobile phones, though the risk is minimal in comparison to those affecting the Internet and PCs. It claimed the trial would enable it to better protect the security of its customers.

iPolicy Networks, inventor of the Intrusion Prevention Firewall for real-time network protection, today announced its iPolicy-6420 Intrusion Prevention Firewall appliance has been certified "Up to Spec" by The Tolly Group. Furthermore, in a head-to-head comparison, the tests showed that the iPolicy-6420 dramatically outperforms the comparably rated Fortinet FortiGate-3600 Anti-virus Firewall appliance in critical areas such as UDP frame loss, TCP/UDP connection rates and maximum concurrent TCP connections when multiple security applications are enabled. This report demonstrates that the iPolicy-6420 Intrusion Prevention Firewall is dramatically superior in making the network the first line of defense against today's external and internal security threats. In particular, the iPolicy-6420 proved able to complete very high rates of connections and TCP application (layer 7) transactions with a fully loaded network. The FortiGate-3600 completed very few new connections in a similarly loaded network and failed to complete a single TCP application transaction. The results suggest that the FortiGate-3600 itself creates a denial of service condition when there is legitimate heavy traffic.

Internet security company Sophos has completed research showing that 42% of all SMEs only update their antivirus software once a week or less.

Trend Micro Inc. (Nasdaq:TMIC)(TSE:4704), a worldwide leader in network antivirus and Internet content security solutions, today announced that PC World Magazine named Trend Micro's PC-cillin(R) a "Must Have" antivirus utility for home and mobile PC users.

Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) today announced that LAN Times magazine has rated CA's InocuLAN software the best choice for antivirus protection of network environments. The InocuLAN suite-the only solution evaluated that manages NetWare and Windows NT domains from the same utility-was chosen over products from McAfee Associates Inc., Symantec Corp., Trend Micro Inc., and five other manufacturers.

Dr Solomon's Software, the worldwide leader in virus detection and repair, today acknowledged results of the University of Tampere's Antivirus Scanner Analysis study. This newly-released independent test shows Dr Solomon's as having the only virus scanner with a 100 percent detection rate under DOS, Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.

The company also predicts that the biggest opportunity in the market will be security authentication, authorization, and administration software. This segment will grow faster than any other, with a compound annual growth rate of 28 percent from 1999 to 2004. By comparison, the next-nearest segments -- firewall and antivirus--will only grow 17 percent.

In a comparison of three leading antivirus solutions, InfoWorld's Test Center selected Computer Associates' Inoculan as the top performer. In addition to its 100 percent effectiveness in detecting and eliminating all the viruses thrown at it in the test configuration, Inoculan also proved to be the easiest to deploy and manage.