Document Protection Question

Hi all,

New to NOD this week, I seem to have picked a transition time to purchase my product. I will probably ramble here for I have been up too long and need to finish.

Anyway I installed the program NOD32 Antivirus on a Windows XP Pro test machine and it is version 4.0.474.0. I had downloaded it about a week eariler. I ran that a couple of days and liked it so I decided to go ahead and put it on my main machine. (confident I will keep it)

Well here is what happened. On my test machine Document Protection was on by default. You could either enable it disable it or set your Threat Sense Paramaters.

On the real machines I noticed the Enable box and Threat Sense button was greyed out and there is a new box called Integrate into the system.

The instructions I have do not show that new option on the page and my over view page does not show Document Protection turned on. Turns out when I redownloaded the program for the main machines I managed to get 4.2.35.0. So what I am wondering now is, did ESET decide to leave document protection off be default? I am also guessing that choosing the option to Integrate will allow me to turn it on.

The only differences that should make since on the computers that would make me think is was the computer and not the program is the test machine has IE8, the others have IE7. Non of them have any Microsoft Office programs.

I would just play with the features and figure it out but I have been up about 24 hours now and spent the last two weeks testing new virus programs to finally choose this one.

So if someone would be kind enough to explain this is a new option or does IE8 make the difference.

Hope to remain with this program for years. I dropped my last vendor after 9 years they just got bad. No support and a product that got worse every year.

Thanks.

PS Sorry for any bad spelling as I can hardly keep focused on the screen.

 

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=1609428&postcount=2

 

how exactly does document protection even work? i always assume the realtime file system shield wuld scan everything that touches the HD, how wuld adding specific document scanning improve protection? are documents not scanned at all normally?

 

You're right, Office documents are scanned by real-time protection as well. However, if one uses another real-time scanner they can enable Document protection to have the documents scanned by ESET as well. Another reason for having this protection module is that macros contained in encrypted Office 2007 and newer documents won't run unless MS Office detects an anti-virus installed that supports Microsoft Antivirus API.

The reason for having document protection disabled by default is that not many people actually need to use it. Having it registered in the system causes performance issues due to a bug (design?) of MS Office. Our tests showed that merely registering an empty scanning object to the registry causes serious performance issues when opening documents.

 

ok thanks for the info.

 

Marcos,
Thanks for the reply, it was a great help.
Let me see if I understand this correctly.
NOD 4.0.x had the document protection on by default.
NOD 4.2.x has the document protection off by default.

Since I am using NOD as my real time scanner I do not need document protection turned on unless the following occurs, I get an encrypted MS Office Document that will not run?

Is that about right?

 

You're right. However, with document protection disabled you will still be able to open encrypted documents, but Office will not allow macros in these documents to run due to missing anti-virus supporting Microsoft Antivirus API.

 

Marcos,

Thanks for the info. I will now consider my question answered.

V