eEye Debuts Free Security Software for Windows

Published: April 4, 2007

by Alex Woodie

eEye Digital Security this week unveiled Blink Personal, a free version of its Blink Professional security tools for Windows PCs. In exchange for providing eEye with data about inbound attack attempts on your PC, you gain free access to a range of tools, including an intrusion protection system (IPS), antivirus, anti-spyware, firewall, and other security protection technologies.

eEye is a Southern California company that has been very active in the Windows security arena, researching security vulnerabilities and developing security products. Over the last three years, the company's research arm has found many Windows vulnerabilities which were later patched by Microsoft. The company, which follows responsible disclosure guidelines, also does its best to keep Microsoft honest by keeping track of the vulnerabilities Microsoft knows about, but hasn't yet patched.

Last fall, eEye introduced Blink Professional, a new release of its end-point security software that bundled into one package various security technologies, including Blink's protocol-based IPS, antivirus, anti-spyware, anti-phishing, inbound and outbound firewall protection, system control, and its Retina scanning technology. The product costs about $29 per system.

Now, with Blink Personal, eEye is offering computer users all the capabilities that it provided with Blink Professional, for free. The catch: Blink Personal users must agree to submit network attack data collected by Blink to eEye, which compiles that information into a database that eEye uses to write signatures, which are then fed back into Blink and other eEye products.

If users don't want to participate in eEye's data collection activities, they can pay $29 for Blink Professional. But eEye is betting that customers will agree to participate in the "Neighborhood Watch" program if it helps protect their system.

But eEye isn't counting on Blink Personal's low cost or free offer to move product. The company says its security software is superior to competing products, for several reasons.

One of the big selling points of Blink is the size of the application itself. "The idea behind Blink is it all runs in one system process," says Ross Brown, CEO of eEye. Compared to other security products that require 50 MB or more of memory to run, users will barely notice that Blink is even running, he says.

Brown also touts Blink's protocol-based IPS as providing a competitive edge over other security tools. "The way Blink works is we actually integrate not between the operating system and the kernel, but at the network driver and transport driver interface," he says. "Everything that crosses the wire [is compared] against a database of attacks. We've been able to stop every zero-day that's come out the last two years before it gets to OS execution."

In one exercise at the Fed Reserve pitting two teams of security professionals against each other, Blink's stealthy nature thwarted the team pretending to be hackers, Brown says. "They said, 'We never got a response from the client from the attacks,'" Brown said. "'There was no sound coming back.' We try to make the IPS engine as non verbose as possible."

Blink Personal is available now. The software can be downloaded for free at www.eeye.com/blinkfree.

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