The technology, which forms the heart of the company's soon-to-ship updated Vipre anti-malware software, has been coded from scratch, rather than bought in from a third party.

According to Alex Eckelberry, Sunbelt's CEO, the updated version of Vipre uses a heuristic technique for identifying malware by executing risky programs in a virtual machine environment.

Known in the IT security trade as MX-Virtualisation (MX-V), this technique uses a memory sandbox approach to the execution of potentially suspect programs, even to the extent of emulating code API calls such as the Windows Registry and Communications Interfaces with the rest of the computer environment,

Running virtual machines as a means of testing potentially risky code is nothing new, infosecurity notes, but Sunbelt claims to have beaten the performance issues that have dogged previous applications software using MX-V technology,

In a blog posting, Eckelberry says that the dynamic translation used by Vipre recompiles the program code to be tested in order to speed up the rate of testing.

As well as adding MX-V technology to the mix, Vipre Enterprise is also billed as featuring integral anti-rootkit protection using an application module that loads before the main Windows kernel.