According to Bolin, one of the reasons he moved from McAfee is the fact that Prevx is smaller and more nimble, which he says means the company can be more responsive to the changing security threat landscape.
"There is a rising volume of malware at the moment. Over the last two years we've seen the volume of malware threats exceed the cumulative total of the preceding 30-plus years, and it's clear that these guys [the fraudsters] are making more and more money as a result", he said.
"The problem with traditional security vendors is that they have an existing deployment strategy. The hackers are watching us [internet users] constantly", he added.
The new Prevx president says that to escape detection, the malware authors are changing the DNS entries for their infected websites as many as 40 times a week, and are also making extensive use of social engineering to promulgate their infections.
"Some websites are only there for an hour, so from an IT security vendor perspective, it's difficult to update users' software to account for this", he said, adding that the solution to this is to store all the available information in the cloud, and have users' computers poll that information constantly.
The bottom line to this, he says, is that the traditional approach to IT security is longer enough. As a result, Bolin told Infosecurity that Prevx is developing a new version of its already tiny footprint software that will be just 0.5 megabytes in size and occupy just 4 megabytes of memory.
Servicing the needs of a cloud-based security database, says Bolin's chief, Mel Morris, Prevx's CEO, means that the firm's researchers are constantly monitoring the threat landscape.
"We have five researchers in our security team. They're constantly looking at data in the database and working out what it does", he said, adding that the rapidly changing threat landscape means that most monitoring – and reaction in the form of security updates – is carried out automatically.
"Humans can assist the technology in countering the threats, but the problem comes when you're working out what is good and what is bad. Some 'threats' are actually in between the two categories", said Morris.
As a result of this, the Prevx CEO says his research team are monitoring a lot of code to see what it does. "It's all about data correlation", he noted.
Morris went on to say that Prevx has observed that, in the financial services sector, most users have never seen a real infection, yet research shows that up to 30% of computers are infected in one way or another.
Because of this, he says that Prevx is focusing its attention on the banks, and persuading them to offer its security software free of charge to their customers.
So far, Morris says, Prevx has struck deals with 35 banks and is planning to increase this with version 4.0 of its software.