nProtect Anti-Virus/Spyware 4.0S (AVS4.0S) free antivirus using Bitdefender's scan engine

http://avs.nprotect.com/global/


Yesterday, I posted about version 3.0 of AVS which costs $30 a year. Just now after doing some more searching I came across v4.0S which is completely free. It uses Bitdefender's scan engine along with its own. However, it would seem based on my initial observation that it only receives Bitdefender definition updates once a day. Currently is v7.59218 definitions, whereas Bitdefender is up to 7.59228. However, last night Bitdefender was only 1 version ahead.

Compared with v3, it has a completely different user interface and the firewall has been removed. While v3 was very light, v4 is heavier. I'm doing an initial basic scan, and CPU use is reaching up to 86%, with it usually being over 70% (bearing mind my laptop has got an ancient CPU) which is a lot more than for the previous version. The scan is still underway, so I do not know yet it has any caching to speed up inital scans and make it lighter. However, the previous version did not. I have yet to test impact on system performance when its not running a scan.

Like the previous version, you can set it to not automaitcally quarantine threats. Ignoring threats is easier in this version as it gives you the option to ignore a threat upon detection.

It appears to have some sort of proactive protection, as it was alerting me whenever Kerish Doctor access my hosts file - which I was able to ignore to avoid further alerts. But, there are no proactive protection settings.

My inital thoughts on this are that is too heavy for my liking, but I will do some more testing and post the results here. It would fare better with a newer, more powerful CPU.

 

1 Day updates is absolutely adequate. For the vast majority of users in the world, it's totally fine. So that's not a concern. Also, what's this APT Block I see in this?!?! Have you checked into this aspect of it? APT = Advanced Persistent Threats, a pretty serious technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_persistent_threat

I am not enamored by Bit Defender on Endpoints because I deploy it on the gateway, but if this has other technologies I'd be interested.

 

Woah, this may have some tech worth investigating in it. Also the interface is pretty nice.

 

@Mayahana I have no idea about the APT Block as it can not be configured, only turned on or off (it is enabled by default).

I had some issues with AVS not working properly after it downloaded the first update - which included some program updates as well as definition updates. After rebooting it seemed to working fine, but the real time protection stop working soon after starting a scan. But, I was able to re enable it, and everything seems to working fine now.

 

The real time protection is continuing to stop from time to time. Maybe it is an issue with Windows 10, but the previous version was working fine under Windows 10.

A few items have been deteced in my downloads folder. If you choose to add an item to the whitelist, there are three options. You can ignore that one particular file, ignore any further instances of the particular threat found, or ignore the whole folder.

 

Hi roger_m as we have not touched base before.

Thanks for bringing this application to my attention, but I am sorry to say that after an initial trial run I won’t be going any further with it.

Testing on a new Win 8.1X64 workstation, I3 CPU, Samsung EVO SSD system drive, 8GB RAM, nProtects’s performance left a lot to be desired & that’s putting it politely.

Unless modified by the user the basic scan just covers the Windows & Program files X86 + sub directories. My full system scan default settings just included those too. No other locations, heuristics, compressed files etc were covered.

Whereas other free offering’s from Qihoo 360 / TS or Avast for example will perform a base scan very quickly. nProtect ran like a snail on sedatives.

The running a full system drive scan with 15 GB of files & including all locations, after 30 minutes it was only up to 30% of the way through!!!! I believe the freezing you experienced was down to its abysmal disk access ability as it stuttered like mad scanning my SSD drive.

Not wishing to dampen your spirits but IMO there are many free products on the market that rip this to ribbons as far as performance, detection, usability etc. go. Win 8.1 even does not recognise this as an AV / Anti Malware solution??

To finalise my experience, it was a pleasure dump it & restore a previous disk image from Aomei enabling me to get back to an effective security solution within 2 minutes.

At the end of the day each to their own, but nProtect V4 for sure ain’t my cup of cocoa.

Br

Mike

 

@MikeMT
I hadn't looked at the scan locations for full and basic scan so missed that they were both set to scan the same locations. However, to be fair, when clicking on the Detail Scan icon, the folders which will be scanned are shown, and there is the option to change what locations get scanned, along with the option to not ask for scan locations in future.

In terms of CPU and disk usage, v3 is much lighter, and still receives program updates, but is not free.

I agree with you about there being better free products, but I like testing new products I come across, and I was happy with v3 of AVS - and if was very light.

 

I found it full of issues, and uninstalled it from a test machine fairly rapidly.

 

I am going to try v3 again. I continued to have issues with v4, which would seem from the feedback here to be issues with AVS rather than issues with running it under Windows 10. Doing a full uninstall and reinstall didn't help. However, I have downloaded the installer again with FlashGet, so that it is added to the list of installers that I use FlashGet to check for updates to daily, so I can test it again when a new version is released.

Since FlashGet adds the original date and time to downloads, I can see that the installer for v4 was published over 6 months ago. Surely they could have released a new version with the issues fixed in that period of time.

I found v3 to be very stable.

 

I wonder what they mean with APT Block, does it block exploits perhaps?

 

Hi,
Where I can download this antivirus? On main site,there isn't download link nowhere
Regards

 

-http://dn.nprotect.com/avs40/installer/b2c/nProtectSetup_Global.exe-

 

What do you mean?
On site given in the first post there is a big "Download" button.

 

I open site with Firefox,and with Chrome and there isn't download button.REALLY

 

@Oximoronman.....You are doing yourself a big favour by not getting there

 

nProtect Anti-Virus/Spyware 3.0/4.0S
Gallery: nProtect Anti-Virus/Spyware
http://www.neowin.net/news/nprotect-anti-virusspyware-3040s

 

Not on any of my PC's!

 

From a logical standpoint, it's totally adequate. Remember the threat classification process itself rarely results in signature updates for emerging threats faster than a 24 our cycle anyway. You can test this by working with hours old malware, then submit them to each of the labs, and examine the duration of that submission time to the point of detection. It's rarely faster than a day. The realize that rarely is a machine exposed for more than 8-12 hours per day, which further reduces the threat level.

So let's assume a PC is up and running, and exposed with actual WAN facing user activity for 8 hours, and product A supplies updates 4 times over a 24 hour period, and product B supplies 1 update over a 24 hour period.

System is online from 9am-5pm. (8 hours)
Product A pushes an update every 6 hours (4 times a day)
In that 8 hour window product A updated ONCE.
In that same 8 hour window, product B updated ONCE.

We've done extensive work to determine if there is any real value to choosing products in the enterprise realm with more regular update pushes, and nothing we can do will prove there is additional value to this. Hence why many products default to 240-360 minute update checks (like ESET, Avast, Trend, etc..). What is more important (vastly?) is how fast a lab responds, not how fast the product updates. So the real research and discussion should be based on lab/analysis response times. Secondary would be cloud based, DNA types of systems so a Trend box is much less likely to be infected because of cloud based DNA pushes on emerging or perhaps largely unknown malware. Both of those things in general are much more important the raw update push numbers per day. But I suppose there are marketing reasons why this is brought up by companies, but I haven't seen any real data that proves it offers anything to the end user for improved detection. Some companies push smaller updates more frequently to save infrastructure costs, and I suspect that's the leading indicator for why this is done.

 

Still, no chance here, I don't know of anyone that would configure that schedule.

 

nProtect AVS v4.0 beta was released at the start of the month. It's a new version, but is still using Bitdefender's scan engine, as well as their own.

The website is in Korean, but can be translated with Google.
http://avs4.nprotect.com/



Edit: It is using outdated Bitdefender signatures.

AVS Signatures

Current Bitdefender signatures

 

Nice

 

It's very light. It's using 1 to 2% CPU time, and only very minimal disk use when running a scan on an old Core 2 Duo Windows 10 laptop. Also, it's a big improvement over AVS 4.0S which did not work well due to serious bugs.

I'm not going to keep it installed because I have another antivirus installed too, and don't see the point in running two Bitdefender based antiviruses.

 

Using outdated Bitdefender signatures isn't good.

 

A program update was released today, updating the engine version to 2016.04.03.01. However it is still using the same outdated Bitdefender signatures.

 

Interesting. Just putting my thumb on this so I can check back.