Kaspersky Antivirus
Kaspersky Labs has been one of the best antivirus software developers in the world for over a decade. We will be reviewing Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009 and its functions as well provide you with some real world testing of Kaspersky cleaning an infected system. Kaspersky was founded by Natalia and Eugene Kaspersky in 1997, this Russian company is often the first to find and identify new viruses. Long used in Russia and Europe, Kaspersky is now making strides in the North American market. Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 is one of the most effective antivirus packages in the world today and boasts a great interface with easy to use and intuitive controls.
Setup of Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009 is a comapct 50mb file which downloaded quickly and installed smoothly. We installed Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009 with default settings and opted to have Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009 send suspicious files immediatly back to Kaspersky Labs if detected. This is to help Kaspersky keep its malware signatures up to date and global users protected. Below is the main screen of Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009 which gives the user the current status of the software.
Kaspersky Antivirus 2009 conducts updates as needed every hour. This is important because Malware is constantly being updated and released into the wild. While Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009 can rely on heuiristc definition to possibly counter malware in the wild, you can be assured Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009 will recieve its antivirus signature updates hourly or as needed.
Clicking on the Anti-Malware section seen here is the default settings. User will want to go into and reconfigure Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009 because we noticed the defalut settings did not provide adequate protection. Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009's heuristic detection engine settings were either set and medium of turned off completely. This is to prevent false detection and faster overall scanning of resident files on the harddrive. The default settings are more geared toward the average user or someone who does not want to be prompted with pop-ups with perhaps false detections.
Going into the settings within the Anti-Malware module you will find the ability to fine tune each detection modules setting. It is recommended users go through each of these settings if they wish to fully enable Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009's protection. Again, by default Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009 is set for minimal inturruption and intervention by the user.
By default Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009 only protects the most used ports from virus payloads. If you have software which utilizes specific ports for downloading or browsing for example, you would obviously want to manually add those ports to the list so your packets can be scanned in real time, before the files hit your harddrive.
Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009's "proactive defence" monitors all of the following instances on your computer. Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009 catches unwanted dialers, adware, rootkits, remote access utilities and locks specific registry keys that malicious code may target to damage your computer. Furthermore, KA includes protection from viruses while using IM and ICQ. If you use another IM, you can add those specific ports to the network port list above.
The Online Security module encompasses anti-fishing security and your browser configurations. Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009 can scan your browsers settings and warn you of vulnerable settings or BHOs that would expose your computer to onlie risks.
After scanning our computer, we were alerted to Internet Explorers default settings which are vulnerable by default. We were given the oppertunity to have Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009 fix all the issues and clean browsing history and resident cookies as well.
You will notice with Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009, scanning time has greatly improved. Now a full scan would take you approximately 50% less than it would with the 2008 version of Kaspersky Anti Virus. However, turning up (or on) the heuristic detection would leangthen your scans considerably. This should not be an issue because all users should opt to utilize Kaspersky Anti Virus 2009's full protection potential. In our tests, NOD32 still had the fastest scan times with its heuristic detection on.
See Also: Kaspersky Antivirus with Firewall
