Cloud content management company Box Inc. is stepping up its ransomware protections with the addition of a new malware deep scan capability in Box Shield.

The new feature, to be announced at its BoxWorks 2021 event today, comes alongside a host of productivity-related enhancements that include revamped Box Notes and Box Mobile apps to will help users to collaborate from any location, using any kind of device.

Not surprisingly, Box is making a big deal of its new malware scanning feature. After all, ransomware is one of the biggest threats to enterprise security today, with attacks rising by a stunning 288% between the first and second quarters of 2021, according to the latest data from NCC Group.

Enterprises are worried because the damage from ransomware attacks is immediate and crippling, with hackers locking up data that’s critical to business operations and demanding huge ransoms to unlock it. No wonder, then, that many organizations choose to pay those ransoms, because the only alternative is to stop doing business.

Defending against ransomware is not an easy task, though. The problem with traditional malware detection tools, besides not always being effective, is they create a lot of friction and disruption.

That’s because they work by quarantining potentially malicious content, triggering a cumbersome review process that can hold up people’s work. Often that results in some lax employees working outside secure processes to get things done, creating an opening for all kinds of malware threats.

Box Shield’s new malware deep scan capability is different, pairing deep learning with traditional hash-based or file-fingerprinting techniques that leverage existing data on malware. It creates an additional layer of protection that works by looking inside individual files in real time to try to identify malware, including previously undiscovered types. After performing a quick scan, it will automatically clear the file or block it if it believes there’s a risk.

Box Chief Executive Aaron Levie (pictured) told SiliconANGLE in an interview that Box previously always did a quick virus scan on new content uploaded into Box, using older hash-based techniques.

“Now we do much more advanced deep scanning and run that in our cloud,” he said, adding that the capability will be available in Box Shield later this year. “Users don’t have to install anything. They just grant permission, then we can run all these scans.”

For customers, Levie said the outcome is much higher malware detection rates and far fewer false positives than before. “You have to do a multilayered approach with security,” he said.

Collaboration and productivity enhancements

With their content now more secure, at least according to Box, users will be able to focus more on getting things done. The new Box Notes app arriving in January promises to help facilitate a great deal of that, adding in some enhanced functionality that will help users to collaborate more seamlessly wherever they are.

Levie described Box Notes as a “collaborative workspace” with “rich, embedded functionality for third-party content and better project management.”

The company provided a few examples of how it might be useful. Marketing teams will be able to create project plans, track their progress, and collaborate with internal teams and external agency partners in real-time, for instance. Sales teams can use it to develop sales plays, call scripts and email templates and keep them in sync. Alternatively, recruiting teams might want to use Box Notes to gather interview feedback across the hiring team, the company said.

As for the new Box Mobile App, the focus here is on helping users to do more within Box from their mobile devices. Available today, Box Mobile adds new capabilities including an updates Capture Mode for iOS and Android that makes it easy to upload photos, audio or documents from a smartphone or tablet to Box. It also gains a new optical character recognition feature that can recognize text in a document and transform it into a searchable PDF.

Box also showed off its e-signature tool, Box Sign. The tool is available to all Business and Enterprise subscribers and makes it possible to sign all manner of documents electronically from within Box. It comes with signer authentication tools for security, and integrates with Salesforce so users can generate and send contracts, non-disclosure agreements and the like from within that platform.

Levie promised that there’s more on the way for Box Sign, saying it will see “continued emphasis on powering more and more mission-critical workflows in the enterprise.”

Box had news on the integration front too. The Box platform is already very tightly integrated with Microsoft Corp.’s Teams and Office tools, but users will likely appreciate some of the enhanced capabilities announced today. In Office, for example, it’s now possible for users to collaborate on documents in real-time on mobile apps such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, with all their edits saved automatically to Box. Previously, this could only be done with the web-based versions of those apps.

Box said the enhanced integration with Office will become available in early 2022.

An update to Box’s Slack integration, meanwhile, means Box can now be used in the primary content layer in that platform, so all files will be uploaded directly to Box from within the Slack interface. “So you can now drag a file from desktop to Slack, and it will automatically go to Box,” Levie explained.

Finally, Box showed off the new Box App for Zoom for the first time. This app, announced last month, will make it possible for users to access all of their Box content from within Zoom, select and open files and present them within a Zoom Meeting. Users won’t have to wait either, as Box said the Box app for Zoom is available from today within the Zoom App Marketplace.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: JD Lasica/Flickr