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Home  News Goodbye NOD32; Hello Kaspersky!
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Goodbye NOD32; Hello Kaspersky! |
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Written by Sjoeii
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Tuesday, 17 July 2007 |
Eset’s NOD32 has long been our favorite anti-virus program at NeoSmart Technologies. It’s light, fast, powerful, and pretty damn good at doing what’s its designed to do: keeping our systems clean and virus-free.
In recent years (mainly from last year though), NOD32 has fallen a bit behind in the detection rankings, but for the most part had remained a close contender and a decent choice. Virus.gr has the latest testing results (Link currently not working) as summed up in this post at CyberNet News. In the latest round of tests (and the one before that, and the one before that) Kaspersky is yet again at the top, with a 99.23% detection rate for the newly-released version 7 and a 99.13% for version 6.
Our biggest gripe with Kaspersky 6 was the terrible user interface (which relied on the uber-slow MMC with horrid integration) - plus, we were quite happy with NOD32’s excellent service for all these past years and admittedly a bit reluctant to see its shortcomings.
But all that changed with the release of Kaspersky 7. In a test run, we found 3 different trojans on our machines (for a total of 6 infected files) that NOD32 hadn’t detected (even with heuristics enabled and set to the highest level) which Kaspersky picked up immediately.
The real kicker wasn’t the fact that NOD32 missed a trojan, it was the fact that 2 of these trojans have been listed in the Kaspersky virus signature database since mid-2006, and that when reporting such missed trojans the NOD32 team replies in a mostly arrogant manner.
Looking at this thread where a NOD32 user reported to their tech support that several common trojans1 weren’t picked up by NOD32 but were by Kasperksy, the replies by NOD32 moderators are quite shocking. They start off by claiming that the original poster’s title is misleading purposely accusatory (which it isn’t, objectively speaking) and this later escalates (when a new poster claims to have a list of 21 trojans NOD32 failed to detect) into accusations of virus-harvesting and purposely looking for NOD32’s weaknesses.
What should have been a simple “thank you for your observations and our apologies for the inconvenience” became a highly-ridiculous “NOD32 can do no wrong” thread. We’ve been recommending NOD32 since the start, but to us it is clear that this is where we part paths. If a company makes a mistake an oversight of a single trojan, that we can live with. But when moderators on their forum insist on turning it into a personal attack against anyone that has any issues with NOD32, it’s sign that something very wrong is underfoot.
So, goodbye NOD32, you’ve served us well throughout the years (as previous threads and articles will testify). But it’s time for a new AV that continues to improve and without taking offense to simple mistakes. Unfortunately, pride and failure often to lead to one and the same thing - and if there’s a better alternative, we’d be fools not to take it.
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