Welcome to eScan Wikipedia

Overview

Anti-Virus software often come with sophisticated mechanisms for detecting and cleaning malware. In most cases, Anti-Virus software detects the presence of a malware only after the computer on which it installed is infected. MWL is a revolutionary technology from MicroWorld that is poised to change the way Anti-Virus software handle security threats. Unlike other Anti-Virus software that are currently available, it detects malware at the Winsock layer itself and prevents them from affect the applications residing at the Application Layer.

Description

How MWL Works?

eScan primarily uses MWL to scan the incoming and outgoing network traffic. MWL is placed above the Winsock layer of the operating system. (See Figure 1. MWL Filters) All data passing through the Winsock layer has to pass through MWL. Thus, MWL acts as a transparent gatekeeper and monitors data packets for malicious content. It assembles the data packets coming from different TCP/IP ports into files based on their type into e mails, e mail attachments, or Web traffic, such as FTP traffic or ICQ traffic. It then passes the files through numerous filters, such as virus filters, content filters, and attachment filters. These filters check and issue dynamic notifications based on the validity of the content within each file.

Without MicroWorld WinSock Layer (MWL)

All incoming and outgoing mails, pass through the WinSock Layer at the server level and the client level.

With MicroWorld WinSock Layer (MWL)

MWL sits on WinSock. All content passing through WinSock has to mandatorily pass through MWL, where it is checked for any security violating data. If such data occurs, it is removed and the clean data is passed on to the application.

Note: The main difference between eScan and other Anti-Virus software is that other Anti-Virus software detect infections at the Application layer. By this time, the computer is already infected. eScan works at the Transport layer; this is where the exchange of data takes place. Therefore, it detects viruses and other malicious software before they can enter the computer and infect it.

Benefits of MWL

The following are some of the benefits of the MWL technology.

• It acts as a transparent gatekeeper and checks data packets for malicious content.
• It filters and issues dynamic notifications based on the validity of the content.
• It oversees all data flowing to and from the Internet and processes it without interfering with the applications.
• It provides you with dynamic compression and decompression facilities to maximize bandwidth usage while data flows between your computer and the Internet.

Summary

In this chapter, you learnt about MWL and it role in the working of eScan.

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