Skeptic is an arsenal of malware-detection technology that is designed to protect our clients from some of the nastiest threats on the Internet. It contains unique and patent-protected technology which allows us to offer an industry leading 100 percent Service Level Agreement (SLA) against known and unknown email viruses, strong SLAs for spam capture and near zero false positives.

Internet threats evolve constantly with millions of new viruses and variants emerging each year. Sophisticated and targeted, the latest threats can evade signature-based protection. Companies need the extra reassurance of Symantec.cloud and in particular, our proprietary Skeptic technology.
Unparalleled accuracy

Traffic management and signature based filters stop most malware and spam — but not all of it. With Skeptic technology, you get a unique extra line of defense to protect you against the threats other systems may miss. This extra line of defense is vital, as up to 30% of all malware stopped by Symantec.cloud is detected only by Skeptic technology. Other vendors, without Skeptic technology, might easily miss these threats.

Skeptic technology — the extra line of defense within Symantec.cloud:

Skeptic technology offers unique advantages compared with traditional security measures:

• It is constantly evolving and always up to date yet draws on more than a decade of experience and accumulated knowledge.
• Skeptic builds a reputation database that collects and correlates information from the billions of emails and URLs we process each day across our global infrastructure. The more traffic it scans, the smarter it gets.
• It can detect virus-like behavior, such as signs of keyboard logging or suspicious traffic patterns.
• Skeptic uses dozens of advanced techniques and thousands of unique rules to detect malware including cryptographic analysis, junk code analysis and sandboxes.
• World-renowned security experts work with Skeptic to provide additional protection.
• Unlike appliance and software offerings, Skeptic leverages cloud-based processing power to perform heuristic analysis of emails, URLs, and traffic in real time. Threat data collected by Skeptic is shared globally across our network in real time.
• Skeptic works across email, Web and IM and so delivers protection against converged threats that span multiple protocols.

Reassurance and reliability

Since we first deployed Skeptic in 1999, it has consistently protected our customers from major virus outbreaks. Incidents such as Kournikova, Homepages, SirCam, Nimda, BadTrans and Klez have all caused havoc in the business world — but not for our customers. In fact, since launch, Skeptic has detected millions of different viruses. Quite simply, with Skeptic keeping watch, Symantec.cloud users are significantly less likely to get infected with an email virus. It’s one less thing to worry about.