Antivirus abilities ?

Hello,

In what order do you think are important features of an AV, and what AV's offer the best in them ?

I'd appreciate if any response exclude detection rates, heuristics and update frequency -which I can find the info on.

Also, I don't need info on resource usage/scan speed - lots of posts already on that

The other area's I'm interested in...that I can think of :

1. Unpacking engine (In Order KAV..then....?? is that right?)
2. Web protection (I presume they all analyse what comes through the browser?)
3. Spyware protection (does anyone know detection rates of spyware? Av-comparatives.org doesn't seem clear about this subject)
4. Do any have memory scanners? (or only some of them, or all of them?)
5. Script Protection (do they all have this?)

And any other important considerations ?

...and comparison stats, knowledge etc of the the above 5 things?

 

From my experience there are 4 programs that fall i this category.
Panda,Kaspersky 2006,NOD32 and avast!.

I tested Panda on some site full of crap with lowest IE6 settings (SP1).
Loads of garbage got installed and copied to disk. Panda cleaned them all and even noified me to restart PC in order to clean the remaining mess. I did that.
On new boot i just ran full On-Demand scan and it cleaned few other nasties as well. After that,system was clean. So Panda is very user friendly.
Scans scripts too.

We all know Kaspersky,great overall protection against all kinds of malware including spyware. At this point i would say the version 2006 because it will also have HTTP scanner and proactive options. Script protection only in Pro version iirc,2006 won't make any difference.

NOD32 because of quiet effective generic and heuristic detection,HTTP scanner and speed of scanning+lightness.
Doesn't scan scripts executed over WSH,but does scan script files with HTTP Scanner before they are executed in browser and later in WSH.

avast! on the other hand doesn't really fell in to the same category as those above detection wise,but it's probably the most feature rich AV i have ever seen. We all know the modules,Web Shield checks HTTP straffic,there is also Script Blocker in Pro version,Boot-Time scan is also very important and useful feature. And it did prety well in the same test as Panda (spyware),with some little help of Spybot to clean remaining startup entries. Everything else was mainly blocked by Web Shield and later by Boot-time scan and On-Demand cleaning.

I also think all 4 have memory scanners (not 100% sure for Panda though).

 

Yeah i agree wid Rejzor, Avast is probably the most feature rich AV out there. But as he said, detection is a concern. Dont know much about Panda, but yeah NOD32 and KAV are really good AVs with KAV having a little better detection rate.

 

KAV's script blocker is available in all versions.


tD

 

So, in the real world, Panda performs very well. I've often wondered about Panda. I ran it for a year when a free one year subscription was offered, and I liked it. Then, I began reading that it wasn't as good as some others, and other bad things about it, so never bothered to renew.

I still get offers for some pretty good deals from Panda, and considering your experience, might consider buying it when my Norton trial expires.

 

Panda is VERY heavy on resources. I have heard of their Platinum IS Suite using more than 100MB of RAM in some situations.

 

Thx for correction,but i remember i saw checked scripts counter only in KAV5 Pro. They might have changed that lately i guess...

 

Thanks for all the reply guys, it's helpful.