Antivirus Signature Delivery for FSS
We distribute the Microsoft Antimalware engine and partner with 7 Engine Vendors from around the world to provide maximum antivirus coverage. Each of those partners is continually generating signatures to mitigate new viruses. We make sure those signature updates are available to our Customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Our goal is to pull all available engine signature updates and have them posted on distribution servers in our MS.COM data centers (ready for retrieval by the FSS Client) within 15 minutes of the time the engine partner makes the update available. In addition, we validate the stability of the new signature databases and sign the update packages to ensure authenticity of the update before it’s loaded into the FSS client.
Our operational measurements indicate that we regularly meet our goals, and usually do better. For the Customer, this means that if the FSS product is configured to retrieve updates every 15 minutes, the Customer should have the engine signature updates within a half hour of its being posted by the engine provider.
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Each of the engine vendors provides news on the threats they’ve mitigated on their websites (see links below) and some publish the dates/times the new signatures were made available.
https://www.authentium.com/threatmatrix/
https://www.ca.com/us/securityadvisor/
https://www.kaspersky.com/avupdates
https://www.norman.com/Virus/en-us
https://www.sophos.com/security/
Windows Live OneCare Update Forum: https://forums.microsoft.com/WindowsOneCare/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1259&SiteID=2
Molly Gilmore
Program Manger
Forefront Server Security team