how good is tauscan really?

i dont need recommendations for tds,BOclean or th, i just want to know if tauscan is a decent trojan scanner or not.

also, will it cause a slowdown running alongside kav4.5 ? or would you say that tauscan (or any other AT) is uneccesary alongside kav?

thanks

 

this thread should answer all that: http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=13687

if you don't believe it tauscan has a free trial available..so try yourself

please read our TOS - Pieter

i used to be a tauscan user, it has saved my bacon at least twice..just that last update was 12/03, and the scan engine needs a serious revision..

 

I am a registered user of tauscan , but after a reinstall of windows didnt bother putting it back on as its way behind the other ATs you mentioned.I never had any compatability issues with it and it scanned quite fast , just the lack of updates make it pretty useless.It seems to have been put on the back burner while agnitum concentrates more on the firewall outpost ,regarding updates and support (imo)
ellison

 

I guess having tauscan is better than nothing, however, in my experience it has never found anything - my AV has always kicked in to protect me.

The support has not been that good - eg, I have pointed out serious flaws in the scanning system to their tech support (if you use the scanning wizard there is a problem which means it does not scan all the files - misses about 40% of them) - but they have never responded to any of my emails - and this flaw exists in the latest version - along with some new problems that were not there in previous versions.

The database updates are infrequent - about every 2-3 weeks - and there seems to be little effort on their part to put any more resources into this.

An example of their attitude to the database update is the fact that right now on their website, the database listed is dated as the 29 Dec 03. Tauscan uses the crude method of the actual creation date of the database file itself to determine if your database is older than the one on their site - so if you use an an application which randomizes the times of the files on your PC (as I do) Tauscan cant determine if your database needs updating - so you need to manually download the file from their site. The problem with this is that for the last two months they have not updated the html on their site to reflect the status of the new file. Eg - the file on their site is in fact the new one (19th of this month) - but is listed as being the 29th of last month!

They did a similar thing with the last update - but instead, they updated the html - stating that the new database was there to be downloaded, - but they had not actualy pot the new database there, but left the old one!

I know Im having a moan about them, but I honestly feel that with the level of support offered at the moment and the lack of effort in providing regular updates, Tauscan should be offered as freeware. Until they update the scanning engine (it cant detect polymorphic trojans at the moment, and when set to use heuristics and detect binded trojans it takes about 9-10 hours to perform a system scan) I would say you are better off investing your money in TDS or Trojanhunter.

As I have said, in all the time I have used Tauscan, it has never found anything that I have just come accross - whereas my AV has. I have even downloaded the latest versions of trojans - some a month or so old - and it usually fails to detect anything - if always fails if the trojan is only a few days old - and i would guess that a potential hacker would only use the latest versions of a trojan.

If you look at their website at their comparison charts etc you will see that when they compare Tauscans detection rates against other ATs, - they have use the unobjective method of only selecting trojans thet are in Tauscans database - rather than a random selection of real-world/wild trojans!

Anyhow, I hope Agnitum sort it out as I feel at the moment they are not doing themselves any favours.

Thast my 2ps of opinion!