Is This File Safe Or Malicious?

• April 9th, 2014
PC security

In this age of digital communication, it’s common to receive email attachments that we open without thinking twice. But did you know that close to 1 in 25 email attachments are actually malicious? Some malicious attachments come from spam emails, which usually are easy to identify, while other emails appear harmless to the naked eye. So how do you determine if the Microsoft document or PDF file you’ve received from a job recruiter is legitimate or not?

And for those of us in the U.S., our tax deadline is in six short days. Millions of tax filers will scurry onto the Web to prepare last minute tax documents. Cybercriminals take full advantage of this by sending out emails purporting to be from the IRS, a personal accountant, or other tax services. Do you know if that tax document you received from your accountant is legitimate?

You might think to yourself: “But my PC is protected with an antivirus!”

While having an up-to-date antivirus is vital for the security of your PC, new threats emerging every day make it so it’s no longer sufficient enough. Antivirus engines rely on a database of known fixes (otherwise known as signatures) to accomplish its task. With 315,000 new threats being discovered every single day, you can expect that the database is not constantly updated with signatures for these new threats.

Therefore, these new threats are unknown to your antivirus because the signatures have not yet been developed. And if the database does not have the signatures, then your antivirus cannot protect you from these new threats. Simply said, you can only treat a disease if you have the vaccination.

So, the question raised here is: “How do you stop a threat if there isn’t a signature?”

Take a look at our infographic to see how ZoneAlarm Threat Emulation* protects you from both known and undiscovered threats hidden in common files, including those PDFs and Microsoft Office documents you may receive over the weekend. ZoneAlarm Threat Emulation protects your PC from infection by opening your file attachments in a virtual cloud sandbox, which then are analyzed to determine whether they are safe or not.

With ZoneAlarm Threat Emulation, you’re using the same industry-leading technology developed by our parent company, Check Point Software Technologies, that is offered to all of Check Point’s worldwide customers, which include 100% of the Fortune 100.

So rest assured that ZoneAlarm Threat Emulation will protect your PC from both known and undiscovered threats!

*= Threat Emulation is only available in ZoneAlarm Extreme Security.