Check Point to offer corporate anti-spyware

Integrity Anti-Spyware, scheduled to hit the market in November, is designed to detect, automatically quarantine and remove spyware programs. Check Point, primarily a seller of firewalls and virtual private networks, historically has been slow to launch new products. With this move, the company has joined McAfee and Symantec, which introduced enterprise anti-spyware products earlier this year.

Check Point is offering its anti-spyware application with its SmartDefense Anti-Spyware Service, which provides updates from real-time spyware information collected through its network of ZoneAlarm users. Integrity Anti-Spyware will be offered as an add-on-module or part of the Integrity product suite.

"Spyware is becoming a very potent threat to every business today...it is responsible for significant dollar losses," Gonen Fink, Check Point's vice president of solutions and strategy, said in a statement.

A few competitors entered the market in February of this year. Symantec debuted its Client Security 3.0 and AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.0, which are designed to automatically detect and remove spyware, adware and blended threats. McAfee unveiled its Anti-Spyware Enterprise, which is designed to remove spyware, adware, dialers, keyloggers, cookies and remote-control programs.

"We began shipping our anti-spyware product at the end of the first quarter, and it's done well," McAfee president Gene Hodges said during a presentation at the Morgan Stanley Software, Services, Internet and Networking conference last week. "There's been a lot of discussion around pricing, and a lot of customers are demanding free anti-spyware, but our anti-spyware discounts have been less than our antivirus discounts."

Later this year, Microsoft expects to unveil its Client Protection security software for corporate customers. Its product will be designed to address desktop security, including spyware to viruses, for business users.