Change of tactics in war on viruses

Could quarantining e-mails be a better way of dealing with viruses than the traditional approach used by most antivirus companies?

With increasingly diversified threats and a splintered antivirus industry, some security providers are arguing that mainstream antivirus companies are simply not nimble enough to cope with new waves of malware. Traditional approaches to providing updates -- which require the malicious code to be in the possession of the security companies -- are fundamentally flawed, the argument goes.

IronPort, a US purveyor of Web monitoring services, is one of the companies championing a different approach to dealing with viruses, worms and other nasties. The technology that IronPort uses to filter spam and quarantine e-mails is different from most other vendors -- it uses "Web reputation" as a basis for quarantining suspect e-mail traffic.