Kaspersky Lab has taken out patent No. 2460133 in Russia, which describes a technology for protecting programs and the data handled by them while running on an infected computer
Kaspersky Lab has taken out patent No. 2460133 in Russia, which describes a technology for protecting programs and the data handled by them while running on an infected computer. In situations when a malicious object has already penetrated the operating system, the solution developed by the company’s experts is capable of isolating specific applications from the infected environment.
It is hard to imagine life today without the Internet, which offers more and more online services for work and leisure every year. According to a study carried out by O+K Research in May 2012, 69% of users worldwide use online banking, 77% shop online and 83% communicate on various social networks. The data involved in these activities is usually processed by the browser and stored on the computer’s hard drive. This means that in the event of infection it can easily be accessed by attackers.
User information, particularly financial data, is of great interest to cybercriminals: about 125,000 new malicious programs designed to infect the system and intercept data appear every day. The technology patented by Kaspersky Lab prevents data from being intercepted while being processed by a client application, e.g. a browser, by putting the program in a secure environment – a so-called sandbox.
The technology, developed by Vyacheslav Rusakov and Alexander Shiryaev, places a running application in a secure virtual environment, thereby protecting it from unknown malware that may be active in the system. To do this, the technology intercepts requests to the system registry, the file system and operating system components, analyzes them and, if necessary, provides virtualization of the requested objects. Virtualization prevents the malware from accessing the data saved by the program. After the protected application finishes, the user can delete the history of changes made by the program or, if no traces of malicious activity have been detected, move the data from the virtual environment to the real one.
Patent No. 2460133 taken out by the company’s experts is the latest of more than 60 issued to Kaspersky Lab in Russia. The company’s entire portfolio includes over 120 patents issued by patent authorities in the US, Russia, China and Europe.
