McAfee Tuesday began feeding signatures to detect and block spyware to enterprise customers using its IntruShield IPS (Intrusion Protection System) product.

"McAfee is committed to identifying, alerting, proactively blocking, and cleaning these potentially unwanted programs from customers' environments," said Vincent Rossi, the senior vice president of product management, in a statement.

The opening round of anti-spyware signatures will protect against a broad range of the most common adware and spyware, said McAfee, and is designed to sniff out and stop communication between the on-the-PC portion of the spyware software and the spyware's backend servers. The signatures will also prevent any spreading of spyware within the network.

The signatures are the same ones available to users of McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.0i, McAfee Secure Content Management, and McAfee Foundstone technologies, said the Santa Clara, Calif.-based security firm, and like its virus signatures, will be regularly updated.

On Wednesday, McAfee will go one step farther by making available a public beta of McAfee Anti-Spyware Enterprise Edition Module to users of VirusScan Enterprise. The module will scan systems to ID, block, and eradicate spyware, adware, dialers, key-loggers, Trojans, and unwanted remote access tools.

McAfee said that the upcoming module, which will be available from its Web site, will be integrated with VirusScan Enterprise, and like that product, can be centrally managed using either ePolicy Orchestrator or ProtectionPilot.