simple homepage hijacker missed by NOD

I understand your frustration. But, you can't simply rely on an antimalware application to protect you. Sure, whatever an antimalware application can detect, it will prevent the infection; but, sometimes, even at that some fail...

I do not know what security measures you got protecting your system, but if I were you I'd start to consider the defenses you got there.

Is there any need for an antimalware application? That will depend on the person, and the decision will be up to him/her, and no one elses.

But, don't make the mistake of believing it will protect you against everything, because it won't. Bad people are always one step ahead.

You need to bet more on preventive measures and then containment solutions. As a last line of resource backups.

 

probably will have a shot at NOD v5 and see whether it fairs better than v4. If not I will probably let go of AV products entirely, do not see the need anymore. most of the OS have evolved with decent security measures, if properly implemented and not switched off), as well as the latest browser generations of FF and Chrome (IE9 is not much better in security than IE8 or IE7 for that matter)

leaves the offline threat when exchanging data via USB with an untrusted source (there are scenarios when there is no way around it). but that would require a core improvement in the AV engine.

 

Portable Flash Drives are the no. 1 source of virus infections here in our country. Internet cafes are everywhere...and students don't care whether flashdrives are free or not. They share it with anybody.

 

that is one of the core shortcomings in today's AV solutions and a reason that malware is still spreading (beside the careless user) - the AV solutions are made for users in urban/metropolitan areas with sort of decent internet connections, who can benefit from frequent signature updates and/or cloud services. of course those are the potential customers from the monetary point of view.

those in rural areas with often less income and education and slow/no internet connection are left behind in the protection scheme but spreading malware nonetheless offline. if the AV core would be improved for better offline detection rates instead of relying more and more on cloud detection things could be improved vastly. but this of course is wishful thinking considering the cloud hype and the promising profit.

leaves the question - is there a real intention to combat malware besides generating profit from the threat of it? and will NOD v5 improve core offline detection with better heuristic/hips/sandbox?

 

To be honest, the OP has a point. For myself and more PC-savvy users (those who don't click on every link and exe they can find) I still use NOD32 on some workstations. I also use Avira and Prevx on other machines. I use them just for the sake of comparing and satisfying my curiosity in order to form my OWN opinion.

I frequently notice NOD32 is the slowest in adding samples and providing updates: I keep suspicious files that Avira and PrevX flag immediately and kind of keep track of when NOD32 detects them. I do love how their support have picked up again and just recently Marcos has been of great help.

So yes, detection rates need to improve to catch up with the best. This should be obvious by now. Hopefully, Eset will accomplish this without increasing the FP rate (which is noticeably higher with the other products I use).

 

It all boils down to what files you add to the test set and how you do the test. I very often see malware detected by ESET that we receive via ThreatSense.Net or from other sources which is undetected by the majority of other famous AVs. However, the fact that a file is not detected by an on-demand scanner does not imply that the AV software doesn't protect against that kind of infection. There are other ways of protecting pc like web guards blocking access to websites known to host malware, memory scanners, hips, behavior blockers, cloud, etc.
Another question is if the files you test are actually fully functional malware. Therefore we kindly ask you to submit any suspicious files you come across to ESET as per the instructions mentioned in previous posts.

 

LOL at this thread. No av is going to catch everything. The thing to do is to submit samples to Eset as has been said many times. No one is forcing you to use the product. If you're not happy with it, there are many others to choose from.

 

Portable flashdrives as I said is one of the easy carrier of malwares. Here's a sample viruses that was detected by NOD32 when my niece inserted her usb flashdrive in my pc after her visits from internet cafes. USB Disk Security immediately detected and quarantine some virus/malwares, but still NOD32 detected more: