Panda feeds safer transactions

By communicating with threat data stored in the cloud versus attempting to save that information onto end-user's machines, the system works much faster than previous transaction-based technologies, the company said.

"To do a scan at the time of the transaction hasn't traditionally worked, but through using collective intelligence, we're able to provide broader and immediate protection, to know what's going on right at that moment," said Gary Leibowitz, head of U.S. security operations at Panda.

"The end-user merely downloads an ActiveX client once, and then the e-commerce or banking sites invoke the scan at the time of the transaction; we believe this provides companies and end-users with the ability to make smarter decisions about whether or not to allow something to go through," said Leibowitz.

Some analysts are pushing for more anti-malware vendors to begin using their customers' computers as harvesting points for new attacks based on the wide variety of threats being distributed on the Web today.

Andrew Jaquith, analyst with Yankee Group, has dubbed the approach as "herd mentality" for security.

"By turning every end point into a malware collector, the herd network effectively turns into a giant honeypot that can see more than existing monitoring networks," said Jaquith. "Scale enables the herd to counter malware authors' strategy of spraying huge volumes of unique malware samples with, in essence, an Internet-sized sensor network."