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McAfee's Site Advisor service looks at possible malicious behaviour on Web pages visited by its users. If anything is suspicious, users are warned with a toolbar on their browser to exercise caution.

Overall, McAfee is open to a cloud-computing approach to anti-virus service, Mandalam says. The vendor's Total Protection service even combines server-side protection with client-side protection to help filter out malware and spam.

"We believe there's a lot that can be done in the cloud," he says. "But there are a lot of threats going around and we believe you need a combination of both. There needs to be an agent that resides on the desktop as well."

For example, even when a client is disconnected from the network, you would still require protection against  malware potentially introduced into the machine via USB flash drives, Mandalam adds.

CloudAV researchers are optimistic their product will work well with mobile devices.

"We're expecting attacks on mobile devices to grow over time," Jahanian says. "But these devices are constrained for power and resources, so the idea of running heavyweight security software is a difficult concept."

Portable media has been identified by Symantec as a point of concern for digital security in the near future. External storage devices – which are experiencing rapid and widespread growth – could constitute another attack channel, the vendor's latest Internet Security Threat Report says.

One example of malware being spread by a portable device is the Fujacks worm. It was found on a media player manufactured in China and then imported by a Dutch company.

Because the CloudAV host-based client is lightweight, and the actual processing is done in the cloud, it could go easy on mobile device resources while providing good security.

A test done on Nokia's Emo system shows it places less of a burden on power consumption than other mobile security products, according to Oberheide.

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