Anyone heard of mks_vir 2004?

Wow! You included ClamWin in your tests. Many thanks. This is the very first test information I have seen on that OpenSource AV. PLEASE keep up the good work.

merci...... bellgamin

 

I sent them a couple of enquiries about the trial version via e-mail and received a reply back from their support section within a couple of hours.

So at least this side of the operation looks more promising than Extendia/Boomerang Software and AVK Pro

They will have a mirror website up soon for downloads of the trial version.

 

I downloaded the demo and it looks good.

 

FYI price has now been reduced to $29.95. Not a bad deal at all.

FF quick question... you have heuristics set to standard or high in your tests? Also how many FPs for MKS?

 

Quite right tazdevl. $39.95 was a little dear. It's not much, but that $10 drop puts it at a price point that I wouldn't worry a whole lot if it didn't work out.

I downloaded the demo and installed it on a second boot partition on my PC. It doesn't look bad at all. It's a spartan GUI - which I generally like for this type of application - when I'm fiddling with AV apps, aesthetics are the last thing on my mind. Too bad the demo can't update (I guess that functionality is disabled - haven't checked if it's a problem with my PC yet). There was one comment of an incompatibility with Outpost Pro - I run Outpost and haven't noticed anything along those lines yet - although since I can't update that's a problem I likely wouldn't encounter anyway.

Blue

 

I think that once they gain some credibility, get a few certifications (VB, ICSA, West Coast, Check Mark, couple reviews on known websites), an increased price makes more sense. But being a new player on the market means they need to prove their value before charging for it.

As you mentioned, new pricing will help mitigate some of the risk, though they have been in the business for a while, just not outside of Poland.

Blue, send something to Kamil kkoniec@mks.com.pl with your problem. You are right about the demo. Cannot update. Demo is updated to the day you download though. Might also want to mention in your email that a fully functional demo makes more sense, let's the user experience the product etc... Just makes more sense for them to observe best practices when it comes to the demo.

 

From the official MKS website:

This installer can be used for the installation of the demo version, that can be evaluated for 30 days.
Demo version can be installed only once and cannot be updated.

Mariusz
Soltech Computer Technology, LLC
www.stormbyte.com

 

For now we are only a distributor of mks_vir but we will try to give answer to any question you may have, and help to solve any problem with mks_vir 2004 software.

Mariusz K. Sasinski
Soltech Computer Technology, LLC
www.stormbyte.com

 

Mariusz,

There wasn't a large amount of detail in the comment related to Outpost (it's at the top of page 2 of this thread). Have there either been any other reports along these lines or do you know of customers who use both Outpost and MKS together successfully?

Any information would be appreciated. Thanks.

Blue

 

We, at Soltech, are using Outpost and mks_vir at the same time on couple Windows machines we have (rest is running Linux ) and we did not see any problems, but tommorow I'm going to install both of those programs and see if there are any issues with the default set of rules for the Outpost Firewall.

Mariusz K. Sasinski
Soltech Computer Technology, LLC
www.stormbyte.com

 

To tazdevl from Firefighter!

In my all tests every scanner is using their best heuristics available On-Demand scanning mode.

About false positive with MKS. Not a single FP in a couple of weeks until yesterday, one "maybe". Even though I've used the best possible heuristics in the Monitor scan. I've submitted that sample to MKS lab but because of weekend, not answered yet.

By the way. Just finished my scan with DrWeb 4.31b against my new 1494 samples. Comparing MKS with deepest AH and DrWeb 4.31b is quite interresting.

Trojan like malware [449];
334 Backdoor & Trojan, 21 Exploit, 16 Script, 15 TrojanDownloader and 63 TrojanDropper

386 MKS with best AH

358 DrWeb 4.31b


Viruses [908];
77 BAT, 65 Macro, 5 WinHLP, 296 Win32, 418 Worm and 47 Other Viruses

827 DrWeb 4.31b

810 MKS with best AH


and finally Riskware [137];
27 Constructor, 6 Joke, 6 Keylogger, 63 PolymorphicEngine and 35 VirTool

74 MKS with best AH

48 DrWeb 4.31b


Best regards,
Firefighter!

 

Mariusz,

Did you have a chance to assess the compatibility of mks_vir and Outpost with default rules? Just wondering. Thanks.

Blue

 

I am having problems using this and Sygate. The only way i can access the net is if I leave Sygate to allow all.

 

I'm using sygate personal pro and mks_2004 and i haven't any problems with this configuration. Only some parts of mks (like mks_update) needs to have "ALLOW" rules in Sygate. I think that is a very good AV but in Poland it's very expensive.... (like symantec) and renew licence is expensive too... There is one bad point in this software - if you want to update mks you must have login and password to yours system. It not works with "empty" passwords. In my work I have password and login but in my home I haven't

 

Hi,
I did not have any problems with the compatibility of both mks_vir and OutpostFW. Only thing I had do is to create rules for mks_update and everything is working just fine.

Mariusz
Soltech Computer Technology, LLC
www.stormbyte.com

 

Hi Mariusz,

Thanks for the quick response. I think I'm going to see how it responds on my machine in the full version.

Blue

 

A couple of initial impressions on the full version thus far....

1. As mikesio has already pointed out, mks_vir assumes that accounts have a password. You need to enter a password based logon account to setup automatic downloads of definitions. Naturally, a manual update does not require this.

2. If your account is not password protected, you will also see that e-mail scanning is disabled.

3. A password protected account is required to perform any scheduled task.

4. The Help system needs a lot of work - I assume that the basic lack of is tied to the time required for a reasonable translation of the existing Help subsystem.

5. The interface is free of glitz and basically about as lean as you could expect.

6. No issues with Outpost yet.

7. So far, appears to play well with KAV 4.5, KAV 5.0, NOD32.

8. I've noticed one screen in which a Polish language button appears - but it is very obvious - it an OK button (Dodaj) when you select a drive/folder in the mks_vir profile dialog box

Blue

edited for spelling, #8 also added

 

I sent them #8 a few weeks ago. Supposedly there is an update in the works.

 

If I can add some early observations to those of Blue, in particular showing some screenshots of this AV.

It seems fairly light on system performance; places 5 running processes in memory which together take about 28500 K Virtual Memory. This can be reduced by not loading the mail scanner which takes about a third of the VM load. So no noticeable slowdown was seen on my laptop but this is 3.6 GHz and has 1GB Ram but there was some slight lag seen on a 1.4 GHz, 512Mb Ram desktop. Therefore, the RTM may slow down some older machines

It seems pretty stable and I have tried it out as a secondary scanner on a number of boxes with different primary scanners installed and there have been no conflicts so far.

 

Some shots on the On-access Monitor;

 

Some settings for the Monitor;

 

Care is needed when using high heuristics;

 

The scanner is fairly fast and definitely faster than KAV but not in NOD’s league. When scanning however, CPU usage can reach 100% so sit back and watch. The small number of files seen was due to the fact that in this scan, only my 'Downloads' folder was scanned.

 

You have a number of ways to 'remove' malware, including quarantine. This was a false positive.

 

The program also has an e-mail scanner;