Proactive Defense, the new feature of Imunify360, has now been released to production for cPanel customers. This new technology has made a significant contribution in our multi-layer security in stopping malware and protecting your Linux Web servers from most, if not all, attacks.

Security has to be effective, and Imunify360 with Proactive Defense is.

Proactive Defense protects against malicious activity not by scanning and identifying signatures of malware, but by recognizing malicious intent based on the behavior of the PHP scripts. While there are millions of various strains out in the wild, all malware behave in a similar manner, and the number of variations of those behaviors is relatively small. We have developed a proprietary technology to be able to recognize those behaviors and to recognize those with malicious intent. Therefore, even if there is an unknown, zero-day attack in play, Proactive Defense will recognize the behavior and prevent hackers from getting into your servers.

During our last webinar, I explained how Proactive Defense works and why it is so effective in stopping malware from running on servers.

So, how did it perform during beta?

For the past several weeks, Imunify360 with Proactive Defense beta has been broadly tested while running on a few hundreds of servers and thousands of websites. We are happy to share that there has been not a single false positive report for the Proactive Defense feature, and we are working hard to ensure that those will be minimal to none going forward.

But don't take our word for it. Patrick William of RACK911 Labs said that "it will stop almost all malware in real-time", and that "there is nothing else on the market that offers such a high level of security". You can learn more about this preemptive security feature here.

Where we are now and what's next

As of now, we have analyzed thousands of malware samples to develop heuristics to distinguish malicious behavior from an execution of legitimate scripts. We have tested Proactive Defense for false positives on most common CMS and e-commerce applications, and a large number of popular plugins. We have focused on those that are most common, most vulnerable due to the high volume of older versions of software running, and those that are frequently targeted by hackers.

But the work is never done. This is an ongoing effort to profile behaviors from new CMS and e-commerce software, multiple versions of the software, and new plugins to make sure they don't create any false positives. When the new versions of the software or a popular plugin come out, we will again scan and test it. Upon release of the new version of Proactive Defense, we will rerun all the tests before it is shipped. We will consistently focus on developing a product that will deliver zero false positives to our customers.

Proactive Defense now works with cPanel, but the version for DirectAdmin and Plesk are coming shortly.

In the webinar on Proactive Defense, we cover how this technology works and show the demo.

Try it for yourself

We hope you give Imunify360 a try -- we offer a full-featured free trial -- and test out the new Proactive Defense feature. If you already run Imunify360, see how to enable it.

If you have any suggestions, please write to us at feedback@imunify360.com.