ESET Smart Security Premium review and comparison

[Thinkmobiles 0]

Dear community,
The software seems to be very interesting and useful.

We have created detailed review and comparison with main competitors (Review).

The article includes brief information on most important pros and cons of the ESET software and its most important features. 

 

 

 

*To the forum Moderators: if the topic should be placed in another category, please, move it.

If placing such topics requires additional arrangements, please, contact me via PM to discuss the related issues.

Edited January 26, 2019 by Thinkmobiles

[TomFace 539]

You might want to review #20 in https://forum.eset.com/topic/76-rules-of-the-eset-security-forum/ 

I am just a user, not an ESET employee or Moderator.

Just a suggestion.

Regards,

 

Tom

Edited January 26, 2019 by TomFace

[Thinkmobiles 0]

Hi Tom,

Thank you for the important notice. 
The account is registered with the email address from the company`s domain just according to the rules, so the admins may check that it is our official account. 

If there are any other restrictions, I will be happy if the moderators would contact me. 

Best regards,
Danil
Thinkmobiles 
 

Edited January 26, 2019 by Thinkmobiles

[Marcos 5,071]

I, for one, don't see anything wrong with this. However, I have several comments:

- The reviews include applications that are on the  verge of PUA classification. I have just submitted Spyware Terminator for analysis since it appears it was detected in the past.
- The reviews are very brief and provide only very general statements. Readers would be more interested about technologies used in particular products as well as a test of detection and cleaning capabilities of reviewed products (e.g. there is no mention of ransomware protection; in case of ESET it's also LiveGrid, streamed updates, Advanced memory scanner, a strong web access and email scanner, etc. which add a lot to protection). Of course, detection, cleaning and performance tests are not easy to perform and one must be an expert with skills and experience in this field.
- Re. the eview of ESET:
1, in the table it was listed as ESET Smart Security which is actually a product that was discontinued with v11. We now offer ESET Smart Security Premium, ESET Internet Security and ESET NOD32 Antivirus for home users.
2, There was a price ~24$ listed in the table. I recall it costs about 40$ in the US which is a standard price without any discount.
3, "Basic mode ignores containers" - even potential malware in archives does not pose any risk since it would be detected by real-time protection upon extraction. The goal of the Smart scan is to scan local disks for threats as quick as possible and therefore it has scanning of archives disabled intentionally.
4, "In-depth scan lasts too long" - In-depths scan has Smart optimization disabled and scanning of archives enabled to ensure that every single file is scanned. Also of note is that ESET has a very long list of supported archives; the more archive types are supported, the more files an AV can scan and the more time it takes. Also ESET leverages advanced heuristics which is a code emulator and generic unpacker which enables the scanner to scan the code beneath the envelope even if modified by malware writers to evade detection. Therefore comparing scan times of an AV that supports 20 unpackers may be much different than of an AV that supports 100 unpackers.
5, "Intensive on resources while scanning" - the scanner uses a whole CPU core to finish scanning asap. On multicore CPU-powered systems this shouldn't be an issue since all other cores are left for the OS and applications. Scheduled scans can be configured to be run with low priority.

[itman 1,659]

32 minutes ago, Marcos said:

3, "Basic mode ignores containers" - even potential malware in archives does not pose any risk since it would be detected by real-time protection upon extraction. The goal of the Smart scan is to scan local disks for threats as quick as possible and therefore it has scanning of archives disabled intentionally.

To this, I would add Eset scans archives upon download and prior to creation on the disk using its Web Filtering protection.

Two tests to verify its effectiveness in this regard are:

https://www.amtso.org/feature-settings-check-download-of-compressed-malware/

http://metal.fortiguard.com/

The Fortinet test is designed to test corp. Network perimeter security devices. Eset scored 17/18 which Fortinet rated excellent.

[Thomas Stats 2]

On 1/26/2019 at 8:38 PM, Thinkmobiles said:

Dear community,
The software seems to be very interesting and useful.

We have created detailed review and comparison with main competitors (Review).

The article includes brief information on most important pros and cons of the ESET software and its most important features.

*To the forum Moderators: if the topic should be placed in another category, please, move it.

If placing such topics requires additional arrangements, please, contact me via PM to discuss the related issues.

Thinkmobiles, thats really nice article.  I have read it from the beggining to the end. Our company also did a many reviews of Eset Products and planning to do it much more. I hope you also appreciate our efforts  

*To the forum Moderators: if the topic should be placed in another category, please, move it.
* If placing such topics requires additional arrangements, please, contact me via PM to discuss the related issues.

[Nevi 0]

I have just tried the test here:hxxp://metal.fortiguard.com/tests/ 

Eset didn't catch the passworded zip file. Is there anything you can do to fix this? I use EAV.

Best

-Nevi

Edited February 10, 2019 by Nevi

[Marcos 5,071]

12 minutes ago, Nevi said:

Eset didn't catch the passworded zip file. Is there anything you can do to fix this? I use EAV.

First of all, the test doesn't provide information about detection and protection capabilities of an AV, it tests if your AV works. As for password protected archives, this is a useless test since no software can crack passwords in order to scan the archive internally. Files in password protected archives are scanned by real-time protection upon extraction.

[Nevi 0]

Thanks.

[itman 1,659]

As far as how I believe Fortinet software is detecting the password protected archive:

Quote

The network administrator remembers a great password-cracking tool available from Elcomsoft called Advanced Archive Password Recovery that can help him out so he proceeds to use it to crack the password.

https://www.dummies.com/programming/networking/how-password-protected-files-can-be-hacked/