Enhancements to its GuardIT® solution have been announced by a leading provider of application hardening solutions designed to protect software intellectual property (IP) from tampering and theft, Arxan Technologies. Through increased automation, easier protection processes and selective analysis abilities, the new features make it easier than ever to produce applications that are tamper-resistant and prevent software piracy. Support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 is also included in this release.

Increasing 38 percent year over year and putting software vendors at a high risk of revenue loss due to code theft via tampering or reverse engineering, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and IDC recently reported in their fifth annual joint study on software piracy that the problem is growing at an alarming rate. To a total of $48 billion in 2007 alone, the study concluded that worldwide losses due to piracy rose by $8 billion.

Arxan has increased, as a result of the business need to protect software applications and continued customer demand, the ease of use and automation capabilities of a proven commercial software protection product for both managed and native code, its GuardIT solution. The GuardIT family includes GuardIT for Linux, GuardIT for Windows  and GuardIT for .NET, and all GuardIT offerings feature easy to use, automated, yet customizable protection across desktop, embedded and server software applications.

Along with protecting programs targeted for Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® Desktop operating system, version 5 with update 1, 32 bit (x86) and 64 bit (x64), GuardIT now protects programs that are built with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (Visual Studio Version 9.0).

Software providers, now armed with GuardIT's increased automation, can continue to exercise flexible-yet-granular control over software without impacting performance or changing source code. GuardIT enables software-driven companies to protect software-rich IP against piracy and tampering with an easy-to-use application hardening solution.