News & Events
World's Largest Collection of Software Metadata, the Bit9 Knowledgebase, Grows More Than 200% to 4.0 Billion Files
08.14.2007 - Cambridge, Mass. - Bit9, Inc., the leading provider of application and device control solutions, today announced that its Bit9 Knowledgebase™ has more than doubled in size to 4.0 billion file records from 1.2 billion file records at the end of September 2006, growing at a rate of more than 50 million records per day. The Bit9 Knowledgebase is the largest collection of actionable intelligence about the world’s software, including commercial applications, open-source software, shareware, and malware. It launched in March of 2006 with 250 million records.“As the definitive source for software identification, the Bit9 Knowledgebase serves as an ideal solution for vendors in the Anti-Malware, Software Inventory, Code Inspection, Forensics, and PC Utilities markets,” said Doug Cahill, Vice President of Business Development at Bit9. “For vendors looking for software metadata reporting, Bit9 offers a host of compelling partnership opportunities, including flexible licensing and OEM models.”
The Bit9 Knowledgebase enables IT professionals and partners to identify new, unknown, and potentially malicious software in real time, giving them:
• A single source of information for commercial applications, open source software, shareware, freeware, and malware.
• Comprehensive coverage of software packages. Bit9’s aggressive software acquisition and investigation techniques deliver the highest hit-rate for software look-up queries.
• Actionable information that includes identification, categorization, and security analysis. This information can be used to drive on-the-fly decisions.
• Trustworthy metadata gathered directly from original sources, or in conjunction with open and governmental bodies.
• An open architecture built for extensibility and flexibility, ensuring that the intelligence provided through the Bit9 Knowledgebase will always grow in volume and utility. The Bit9 Knowledgebase is used within Bit9’s award-winning Parity™ application and device control solution and also serves as the database behind Bit9 FileAdvisor™, a free web service (http://fileadvisor.bit9.com) that identifies software files on any Windows® computer.
“It’s imperative that the Bit9 Knowledgebase continue to evolve so that customers and partners have the most comprehensive and up-to-date actionable intelligence available,” Cahill noted. “We’re very pleased to have acquired this much useful information about software in a relatively short period of time and are excited about including more sources and types of metadata to enable new use cases in the near future.”
Here is a snapshot of the amount and type of information now contained within the Bit9 Knowledgebase:
- 50M new files indexed daily
- New files daily: 500K Microsoft, 100K IBM, 250K Mozilla
- 300M unique files
- 33M unique Windows executables
- 9M products indexed
- 20K companies tracked
- 350 Open Source projects tracked
- Files extracted from binary archives:
- 2M Microsoft Office documents
- 2M PDFs
- 10M images
- 20K Microsoft binary update archives generating 1M files
- Approximately 1M pieces of unique malware binaries
- 500+ packer/protector families detected
- 100+ packer/protector families unpacking
- All commercial installer formats, e.g. MSFT’s Binary Differential Updates
- 25+ commercial scanners instrumented
- 20% of unique binaries not detected by any malware scanner
Bit9 has compiled the Bit9 Knowledgebase via an innovative, proprietary method of crawling the Web, through aggressive acquisition of physical media, as well as through partnerships with HP (NYSE: HP), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), and others. In addition, the Bit9 Knowledgebase uses the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) National Software Reference Library (NSRL) Reference Data Set (RDS) -- also known as the NIST Special Database 28 -- as well as the Department of Justice’s Hashkeeper database. Never before have these databases and other sources of information been aggregated in such a massive repository and made available to IT professionals, partners, and Windows users.
For more information about the Bit9 Knowledgebase, visit http://bit9.com/products/kbase.php. To learn more about licensing and OEM opportunities, visit http://bit9.com/partners/strategicalliances/index.php.
About Bit9, Inc.
Bit9, Inc., the leading provider of application and device control solutions, centrally controls which applications and devices can and cannot operate. Bit9’s award-winning, patent-pending technology delivers the easiest and most effective way to achieve Windows desktop lockdown, enabling IT professionals to realize the highest levels of desktop security, compliance, and manageability. Founded in 2002 by the founders of Okena (acquired by Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO)) and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bit9 is a privately held company. For more information, visit http://bit9.com.
Tom Murphy
Bit9, Inc.
617.393.7410
tmurphy@bit9.com
