Aryeh Goretsky

Hello, Yes. Most are going to be detected as spyware, but also detections of trojans or agents are possible as well. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky

Hello, I will see if we can get the best person to answer this question to contact you at the email you used to register with the forum, but we are coming up on Friday afternoon in the U.S. office and a response may not be available until Monday. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky

Hello, I am the author of the Orbital Decay: the dark side of a popular file downloading tool article on ESET's WeLiveSecurity blog. Given the nature of the what was reported, I would caution against using any version of the software. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky

Hello, The site listed in the email us-eset.com as being the sender of the license is not ESET or one of its resellers, but rather some group operating from Iran that sells pirated or counterfeit licenses for ESET's software. Their website is, in fact, blocked in ESET's software. I would suggest that you contact your credit card company or bank to report the scammer and issue a chargeback for a fraudulent purchase. ESET does not do business in Iran. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky

Hello, I have asked ESET's web team to look into this. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky

Hello, You will probably need to submit the files in question to ESET's threat lab for a more definitive analysis (see ESET Knowledgebase Article 141, "How do I submit a virus, website or potential false positive sample to ESET's lab?" for detailed instructions) but generally speaking, NS-prefixed temporary directories and files denote an application which has been packaged with NullSoft Scriptable Install System which, as the name implies, is a software program for making installers for other software. Nullsoft is the same company that made Winamp, a popular program for playing MP3s back in the late 1990s. The detection being reported by ESET's software is of a Potentially Unwanted Application, which is a class of applications that are not malicious software in and of themselves, but that perform activities you might or might not want being performed on your computer (hence the use of the word "potentially"). More information about them can be found in ESET Knowledgebase Article 2629, "What is a potentially unwanted application or potentially unwanted content?" or the in the Potentially Unwanted Applications White Paper published in ESET's WeLiveSecurity blog. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky

Hello, A list of removed programs can be found at https://support.eset.com/kb3527/#removable. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky

Hello, ESET is open to new ideas and suggestions. Just don't expect all of them to be implemented, especially if they offer little added benefit to ESET's customers. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky

Hello, I believe you'll find some of the requested functionality in various programs such as ESET SysInspector, ESET SysRescue Live CD, the ESET Rogue Applications Remover and various other malware removal tools. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky

Hello, ESET could improve its results in tests done by some testers by adding junk files that are damaged, non-executable, contain only data, are otherwise non-threatening, but are detected by other anti-malware programs. Would you like ESET to add detection of junk because those other vendors have included those files? Just because a plethora of companies are doing something doesn't make it right, or even that it offers a benefit to their customers, for that matter. Adding features for marketing reasons is not a path I would like to ESET go down, and I suspect at least some of our customers feel the same way. There are lots of features, enhancements and improvements that ESET has yet to make to its software, and some of those will come out of message threads like this one. So, I encourage you to keep asking and making recommendations. But, also keep in mind that ESET is takes its customers' security seriously and wants to develop technologies that do that, and not spend its time and efforts trying to win marketing battles with competitors. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky

Hello, Cookies are not malicious. While they may (or may not) represent privacy issues, they do not represent a threat to user security. Malicious advertisements are blocked all the time. If you want to block tracking, all ads, etc., I would suggest looking at what plugins are available for your web browser. HIPS updates occur as part of the regular updating of modules used by ESET Smart Security. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky

Hello, False alarms on a web site are a big deal. They affect: Whomever owns the web site. Whomever visits the web site. The credibility of the company which generated the the false positive alarm to begin with. It has been my experience that people who visit web sites do not always know when a report of a problem is a false alarm or not. They might assume it is, and it turns out to be a legitimate report and they get infected. Or, they may contact the site operator or their anti-malware solutions provider, creating a support burden. Just because eight, eighty or eight hundred anti-malware companies do something does not mean that ESET should follow them down the "me, too" path. ESET chooses to implement technologies when they provide a tangible benefit to the computing public. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky

Hello, I simply used Web of Trust as an example of someone who does a reputational toolbar as their core business. As far as I know, all the other companies you mentioned (Avast ... Webroot) make the majority of their money elsewhere. As I mentioned in my previous post, I had to jump through numerous hoops to get my own personal website reclassified (whitelisted), when my previous employer saw fit to advise everyone that my site was unsafe due to its lack of reputation. Now, I was able to get that cleared up in several days, but it took me several days and I had to to take advantage of some professional courtesies (e.g., the fact that I was a founder of that company as well as someone who currently worked at a competitor) in order to get them to update their database. And I was lucky, I had industry contacts to worth through. If I did not have those backchannels, who knows how many weeks or months it would have taken. This difficulty in (1) classifying sites properly to begin with; and (2) responding promptly to reclassification requests makes me believe that there is little additional value offered by site advisory services. Am I biased by my own experiences with a false positive alarm and subsequent difficulties getting that fixed? Yes, I certainly am. But, I also cannot help but wonder how difficult it would be for me get things cleared had I not been able to able to use my contacts. Lots of other companies offer varieties of different services, as a means of providing a layered approach, offering some form product differentiation, or even just performing feature parity for reviewers (i.e., "checkbox compliance"), but that does not necessarily mean that the option, feature or service passes the "works reasonably well" that I think is one of the reasons people choose ESET's software over others in a very crowded, competitive market. Maybe, one day, ESET will offer some kind of add-on, plugin or toolbar that provides a deterministic form of site advisory reputational data. But given what I've seen so far, I just don't feel this technology currently passes the "works reasonably well" criteria as a whole, industry-wide. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky

Hello, Browser plugins are an interesting idea, partially because they can allow for feedback in some interesting ways in the UI, but in terms of content [i.e., what the plugin does] I personally feel it is kind of a "landmine area" (for lack of better term). When you get involved in reputational-scoring of web sites, you pick up several additional areas in your workload. For example: Building and maintaining the site-crawling system (which includes back-end databases, integration into existing systems for research, development, QA, support, etc.). Dealing with false-positive reports. Dealing with false-negative reports. Dealing with reclassification requests. Dealing with attempts to game or manipulate the results. ...and so forth And that's just what I came up with off the top of my head. If you take a look in the Malware Finding and Cleaning section of the forum, you'll note that there are a lot of requests that focus around these types of issues, except for downloaded software as opposed to web sites (although there some discussions surrounding blocked web sites as well). I suspect most users probably visit websites more often than the download and install software, so you can imagine how the amount of work required to adequately manage something like that if the number of requests coming in were to increase by, say, two orders of magnitude. That's not to say that this is a bad idea, or that such scaling issues are not solvable. There are companies like Web of Trust who do this as their core business, and my initial inclination would be to steer people to a service like that, if that's what they're looking for. However, I'd also point out that web reputation systems don't necessarily tell you if a site is malicious or not; they might might tell you something about the relative volume of activity that the site gets, or is mentioned in, but there's still quite a bit of difference between something like Alexa or Google's Page Rank and, say, ESET's Live Grid. Ultimately, what I think it comes down to, though, is ESET's philosophy of doing things. It's been my observation since arriving at the company that it focuses on the areas where it can create products that work reasonably well. That's actually expanded or been tweaked a little over the years to encompass not just creating products, but occasionally partnering with companies or even acquiring them outright (the familiar "build, partner or buy" refrain), but the focus has always remained on the "working reasonably well" part. I am pretty satisfied with ESET's approach of blocking outright malicious sites, prompting of sites that might contain potentially unwanted content, and the parental controls type functionalities that ESET provides. Personally, having to have gone through several hoops (accompanied with lots of shouting, calling in of favors, veiled threats and the occasional hint of a bribe of an alcoholic and/or chocolate nature) to get a former employer's site advisor service to whitelist my own personal web site, I have some lingering concerns about how well such services work. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky

Hello, Already implemented. See ESET Knowledgebase Article #3192, "How do I disable Windows update notifications in ESET Smart Security or ESET NOD32 Antivirus?" for instructions. I would also like to point out that (1) knowing whether "most people around the world using pirate versions of Windows" (or not) is not just very debatable, but outside the scope of this forum; and (2) installing Windows Updates is an extremely important part of keeping your computer(s) secure. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky