Virus Chaser - free antivirus using Bitdefender's scan engine

Actually it doesn't hang, it's just doing the initial update, which may take some time due to the slow speed of the servers. If it's taking too long you can stop the update by going to Task Manager and killing the process called update, and the install will complete.

 

They have nothing in common. (or other way around).Dr.Web is a Russian company and BitDefender is 100% made in Romania.

 

I believe it was a sarcastic comment.

 

Oh...my bad...

 

I'm going to give this one a bit more time to mature before I try it again.

 

I installed it on a second computer last night. This time I did not kill the initial update process and waited for the install to finish. It took some time and it's a shame there is no progress window, but the update did sucessfully download over 800 updates (around 6 months of updates). Almost all of these were Bitdefender definitions, but a few componnets of Virus Chaser were updated too. Virus Chaser's log window, shows exactly what files have been updated.

By looking at the logs (and with VC set to check for updates hourly) I can see that currently, Virus Chaser is updating its Bitdefender definitions every two hours. Sometimes there are updates to its own definitions in between then.

 

I can confirm that while Virus Chaser does not officially support any OS after Windows 7, it is working fine with Windows 10 Technical Preview.

 

E8400 (dual core 3GHz) system running Win7-SP1x64. 50 mbits/sec cable.

Holy cow. It took 20 minutes to download the installer. VC installed in about seven minutes and then spent an hour connected to viruschaser.net (on port 4040) in Korea downloading the 285MB boatload of ~900 BD signatures. Speed was fluctuated between 200-400 kbits/sec. Yes, kilobits per second. The signatures were current and matched exactly the set running on my i7/Z77 desktop Ad-Aware Pro setup. BD's incremental updates run about 5-10MB.

I have the same Main pane as does roger_m in post #1, page 1.

On the Setting pane, I found the Proactive Setting at Not Available. Low, high and very high are the options and I set it for very high. However this did not change the status of Proactive on Main pane, that is, all the little dots blue as On-Active. Nor is "off" in a red state as is E-Mail monitor. So, Proactive very high or dead?

Bitdefender's core engine and threat scanner libraries (and only those two) run under VC's Global Security Services, 64-bit vcsvcc.exe, permanent DEP and ASLR. I can find no other instances of any other BD libraries or drivers or modules running in any capacity. Also in that service are VC's Application Initializer and a be.dll, Blacklist Engine.

VC's Global Security Hooker, Global Security Proxy and On-Access Controller run under non-permanent DEP 32-bit sgbidder.exe, no ASLR. I wonder if this is VC's Proactive component and perhaps the GUI is broke?

VC was successful in detecting a slew of malc0de threats. Upon a detection, a popup will present Cure or Allow. VC scans the file in your Download directory after you select Save. "Cure" deletes the file from the Download directory.

(All BD products will scan a file in realtime as it is downloading to a system Temp folder as a randomly named file. A detection will halt the download, alert via pop-up, and allow you to Cancel. The file, or its remant, is deleted. A file that passes the scan is copied to the Download, correctly re-named, directory upon selecting Save. I know all Ad-Aware products do the same.)

Virus Chaser 8.0 is a Bitdefender SDK implementation at its most elemental with a proprietary Proactive component which at this point cannot be determined as active. In fact, the BD side is so sparse I can't vouch for B-Have and I'm not invested enough to actually run bad code to find out. VC has no malicious/anti-phishing URL protection.

Further, no support, no Help (local or online), no way of finding out what exactly is the Firewall setting or what that "Continuously" in the detection popup does.

While it crosses the "better than nothing" threshold, IMHO - use it at your own risk.

DEC 29 Wrap-Up UPDATE:
When set at one hour, VC does quite well with the signature updates. Within the ~40 hours I monitored that activity, the BD versions were on-time. (Somewhat unusual is that some files are downloaded hourly without updating the update.txt file.) This bodes excellent for VC's BD on-access monitoring versus other free licensed BD products on a 24-hour or "when we get to it" cycle. The very nature of VirusChaser as BD "signature only" makes updates a necessary and critical condition.

In a directory VDB are three files, VCNm.vdb, VCSct.vdb and VCTjn.vdb, 45, 3 and 56KB, two of which have been updated since the install, the other dated 12/18/2014 and are definitely AV/Trojan sigs. Another directory, wdb, has four files bdwe.wdb, sawelt.wdb, scwelt.wdb and vcdrwe.wdb, 1, 20,24 and 32KB dated in April 2014 and the latter Dec 25. The string SGA!ARIA in the header of each file ties it to sgavc.exe, the Virus Chaser Controller. Wrapping it up are the Blacklist Engine previously mentioned and a Whitelock White List Engine, wecorex.dll. Those are dated June 2014 and Nov 2104 respectively. Some AVs have the option to de-select engines; not so with this, so how good the VC side of things is up for grabs here as it would require laboratory methods to quantify.

One interesting behavior I observed on each of the two mornings I started the system was VC's one-time port 1433 connection (typically Microsoft's "ms-sql-s," SQL Server) to KRNIC, the National Internet Registry in Korea under APNIC.

Virus Chaser's uninstaller left behind 722 files worth 189(!)MB in an SGA\VC folder in the user Roaming profile store. The files are timestamped July 2012 thru June 2014. I had not discovered these until after the uninstall. My opinion of these files is unfit for posting...

 

Thanks for the thorough details, FOXP2, much appreciated as always. Seems as though BD's own Free AV is more fully featured in comparison to VC, although lacking any real options or configurations of course.

 

@ WildByDesign - My thoughts exactly. And you're welcome!

See my Wrap-Up UPDATE to my post #58.

Cheers.

 

Why did you switch from Avetix to VC, roger_m, if I may ask?
I want to install a free AV but am undecided between the two.

Thanks!

 

Avetix often won't finish installing the initial definition updates. Aside from that, I prefer the user interface of VC.

Maybe, there will be an updated version of Avetix which will fix the update issues. The current version has not been updated since October.

I may try Avetix again now I'm running Windows 10, as an issue with high CPU lead me to uninstall VC, and I currently have no AV installed.

 

Roger,

My son really needed a light AV after inheriting my legacy Dell Inspiron 6000 (1.8 GHz PentiumM, 1GB RAM) running WinXP. We tried several of the free AVs on it over the past few months and settled on Panda Free. It doesn't seem to tax the CPU and it has been receiving very good reviews of late.

Happy New Year (to all),
Cruise

 

I finally settled on Avetix, mostly because it comes with several locales, including french.

 

Thanks for the tip. Windows 10 won't let me install it due to compatability issues, so I can't use it right now. As far as I know, there is no way to force Windows to install it. But, I will keep an eye out to see when Panda releases a Windows 10 compatible version.

 

Have you tried changing the Compatibility Mode in the installer settings to Windows 7 or Windows Vista SP2? There have been several programs that would not install for me in Windows 10 until I changed the compatibility settings. Worth a try anyways.

 

I already tried that, but it makes no difference as the installer is blocked from running by Windows itself rather than the installer launching and not wanting to proceed when it sees Windows 10.

This is the window I get when I launch the installer:


This is the window I get after I click on Get help online:

 

This is what I was referring to in previous posts - this company has a history of disabling heuristics. They said that it was a requirement from their corporate customers and that reducing FPs was a paramount priority for them as a company (at that time). A comprehensive test needs to be done to determine if B-HAVE is in fact functional in Virus Chaser.

 

hi
but is still free?
the homepage is in chinese or japanese

 

Yes it is free. The download page is here. It's in Korean language, but you can see the links to download the 32 and 64 bit versions (which install in English).

 

Is Virus Chaser a really good bitdefender virus scanner or is there something else that has bitdefender engine?

 

Yes there is a few more AVs that uses the BD engine: http://www.av-comparatives.org/av-vendors/

 

Yeah, Ad-Aware has bitdefender engine and poor results in all tests.

 

It will expire at 31.12.2015. It's not lifetime, it is trial

 

Well it's a long way to go until the end of the year, so perhaps they will send out an update that updates the expiry date before then.