Product information for VIPRE Cloud Agent released on April 14, 2020.

What's New

Over the past few years, we've made many significant improvements to our core file- and process-based detection engines in the Windows agent to the point where we are now consistently scoring exceptionally well in independent antivirus (AV) testing (see AV-Comparatives, AV-Test, Virus Bulletin).

The one major subsystem that hasn't gotten as much attention is the network protection stack—firewall, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and web protection—which provides essential security against network-based attacks. The components built into VIPRE Agent for Windows v11 continue to provide reliable protection but in v12 we are introducing a major update to the network protection stack!

DNS Protection

The most exciting new feature we've added is our brand-new DNS Protection. Built right into the VIPRE agent, this new feature helps prevent your users from ever visiting a known malicious website. This new layer of protection is something many of our customers have historically purchased from third-party DNS providers or as a separate product or add-on, but which we are now including as part of our base offering. Any time your users attempt to look up an internet domain name, VIPRE will perform a comprehensive series of checks leveraging our threat intelligence cloud service to ensure that that remote host is not a known malicious domain. If it is at all suspicious, we'll immediately redirect the user to a block page and tell them that there's an issue: the user's browser will never have a chance to download any content from a potentially malicious webpage.

Refer to Related Articles to learn more about DNS Protection.

Web Access Control

Piggy-backing on this DNS Protection feature, we are also introducing a new add-on called Web Access Control. Although not strictly intended to protect your organization against malware, Web Access Control allows you to define business policies around which types of websites your employees are or are not allowed to visit, choosing from among over 40 categories including Social Media, Violence, Sports, among many others. If you want to make sure that your employees aren't wasting time streaming videos, or have a duty-of-care to protect your employees from accidentally seeing offensive content, then you need Web Access Control.

Refer to Related Articles to learn more about Web Access Control.

Other Improvements

In addition to these major new features, we've made many improvements up and down our network protection stack:

Firewall Improvements

The firewall is now faster and more efficient, providing a solid foundation for the other components. The firewall is designed to protect typical endpoints out of the box with just a few clicks to enable blocking but is easily configurable to allow special services if needed in your environment.

Upgraded IDS

An entirely new Intrusion Detection System (IDS) now provides vastly expanded signature-based detection of common network attacks plus increased performance. Now hosting over 8000 (over 15 times more than v11!) individual detection rules, we've greatly expanded our ability to guard against the latest threats. And for those rare cases where a specific rule conflicts with some custom application in your environment, you can easily disable affected rules to keep your business humming along.

IDS Automatic Monitoring

The new IDS is also more intelligent and can automatically detect dozens of network protocols to provide deep introspection - no more manually specifying which ports to monitor. It won't matter if a service, or even malware, attempts to hide your users' activities by using custom ports. The new IDS decodes all network traffic, automatically identifies the appropriate protocols and services, and applies the appropriate IDS rules to that traffic.

Malicious URL Blocking

In many cases, blocking an entire site (like GitHub) might cause too much disruption, but there is some page or another resource on that site that delivers undesirable content. To solve this problem, VIPRE also scans entire URLs seen in HTTP traffic to ensure that your users don't hit pages that could get them in trouble. This service leverages our global threat intelligence network for up-to-the-minute information about bad URLs and informs your users if they attempt to click on a bad URL link.  

Refer to Related Articles to learn more about Web Protection and Malicious URL Blocking.

Browser Extensions

Two new agent-managed browser extensions—for Firefox and Chrome browsers—provide visibility into encrypted HTTPS web traffic and leverages the same URL blocking service mentioned above. The VIPRE agent pushes these into installed browsers automatically if enabled in your policy, and ensures your browsers stay protected.

Refer to Related Articles to learn more about Web Protection.

Malicious Content Blocking

New Web Exploit Protection replaces our retired Edge Protection feature to find and block malicious embedded content within web pages. Malicious JavaScript code and other risky content is now scanned for automatically and, if found, results in the page being blocked. Effective against malvertising, watering hole attacks, and spoofed websites, Web Exploit Protection protects your users even if they are visiting a brand-new malicious web page.

Refer to Related Articles to learn more about Web Protection.

Overall, the improved network protection stack gives you fast, efficient blocking of malicious IPs, URLs, and network exploits across many more network protocols, as well as plain text and encrypted web traffic. Plus, the new architecture expands our options for future extensions and improvements. We hope you enjoy the improvements!