McAfee is prepping VirusScan 8, currently in beta, for release as its flagship antivirus product. In an exclusive interview with BetaNews, product manager Bryson Gordon sat down to discuss what’s new in the product.

VirusScan 8 manages to meld together McAfee’s distinct boxed offerings with the McAfee.com line of services and achieve a more integrated product. Customers will notice UI simplification and greater consistency amongst individually branded products which McAfee hopes users will appreciate.

The mantra of this year's release is that people do not want to interact with their security application - they want it to interact with them. To achieve this, both basic and advanced configuration options are available. Product updates, scanning, detection, and cleaning all take place silently in the background.

Features found in the upcoming release include: scanning for instant messaging applications, advanced spyware detection, a script stopper, and in and outbound email scanning for Outlook and Outlook Express. However, it is worms such as the now infamous Code Red that are all the hype these days infecting home users at an alarming rate.

To get a handle on the situation, VirusScan takes an approach that differs from its competition. Its "Worm Stopper" technology is powered by non-signature based technology dubbed abstract pattern matching. Various behavioral patterns are analyzed for worm-like behavior. Activities that flag a message consist of mass mailings or even the timeframe in which mail is sent out to a list of recipients.

In a jab at arch rival Symantec, Gordon said, "they call it worm-blocking," in reference to the heuristic approach taken by Norton AntiVirus.

A multi-tiered defense against both emerging and existing threats coupled with the interface modifications are the main changes in VirusScan 8. However, citing consumer feedback, it should be noted that the firewall has been removed as a layer of prevention.

According to Gordon, existing 6.0 – 7.0 customers VirusScan will not lose their firewall installation.

Other improvements on tap include code optimization, and the ability to seek out and monitor in-memory worms and buffer overflows as they are encountered. Product team members claim that this year’s release will be something less of a resource drain.

Despite the added vigilance, VirusScan 8's base footprint weighs in at a lean 5 megabytes.

Pricing has been set at $49, with a September 3 release date.