Here at UMU we are constantly trying to improve our applications by adding new features and optimising existing application components, so I am always asking our development what they are working on.

This week the head of the development team explained that they were working on an update to the engine used in the UMU Scan application. He said they were trying to improve the engine’s ability to protect against the increasing amount of malware in the wild.

I asked him to explain how they could improve the ability of the engine and was speed of operation not the main thing to improve. He laughed and explained that while speed of operation is always important in product development, expanding the engine’s abilities is also very important in order to provide the best defence against the variety of malware that is starting to surface. Ok I thought, but, what are the improvements made in this update and why should I care. He went on to explain that the more instructions our virus analysts can use, the more effective signatures can be.

Ok, I have it, more instructions means better signatures which allows better detection of malware, but I had to ask, will these extra instructions not slow the application down. He explained that, whilst adding new instructions, they have also been making improvements to how the engine applies those instructions in order to avoid any reduction in performance. He went on to say that during the recent testing of the update they noticed that the engine speed had improved by about 10%.

So there you have it. This update will be included in the next release of the UMU Scan application, which is currently due within the next week or two. I will of course keep you posted!