Introducing the Symantec Protection Bulletin

Am I protected? That’s the question I have gotten the most in my years at Symantec, a division of Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO).  And the question is always specific.  I am protected from threat X?  A customer has the question because they’ve seen a news article, a warning from law enforcement, or newly published threat research.  The question really is, am I protected by Symantec from threat X?  There is now a way to answer that question without asking me.  We call it the Protection Bulletin.

One of the great things about the acquisition of Symantec by Broadcom is that it’s given us a chance to rethink the ways we’ve always done things.  One of these is around explaining our protection.  Our protection remains excellent, as this blog explains.  But we realized that our continued innovation in protection technologies has outstripped our ability to communication effectively about it.  We are fixing that.

Few of our detections come from traditional signature-based protection anymore.  The days when every threat had a named signature is over.  The network-based, behavior based and the ML based protection of Endpoint Protection are stopping unknown threats.  It’s the vast majority of our detections today, which is really good.  It means the vast majority of our protection is proactive, stopping threats that haven’t been seen before.  But it eliminates the ability to use signature names as a way to determine protection.

Then how do you know if you are in fact “protected from threat X?”  Here’s a secret… we have always watched news reports, law enforcement reports and other vendor’s research to make sure we haven’t missed a threat.  Belts and suspenders.  When we see the article we check to make sure we have protection and then publish it to an internal site to let everyone know.

So why wouldn’t we make that information available to everyone?  You are right, it’s a great idea.  And now we’ve done it. The Protection Bulletin is now public, available to everyone, and you can read it here anytime. Why don't you check it out now?