Product Review:
Eset Software's NOD 321 Antivirus
by Mitchell Levine
A scary statistic: according to technology analysts
at International Data Corp., computer viruses cost businesses
world wide an estimated $55 billion. Just to take one egregious
recent instance, the well-publicized Slammer worm alone cost
affected industries in the United States and abroad between
$930 million and $1.2 billion in just its first five days of
operation.
While those
projected statistics probably don't take the field of education
in consideration specifically, it's difficult to believe
that our schools remain unaffected. Most readers of this
section most likely believe that they are doing a reasonably
diligent job of staying on top of the problem, and it's true
that some factors are primarily beyond the control of the
average user: numerous security flaws in the most popular
operating systems have contributed substantially to the crisis. “I've installed a top-selling security
suite, and I have a software firewall,” you might say, “I'm
covered.”
Well, it turns out that name recognition isn't
the assurance that you might think. Believe it or don't, the
most frequently used and best known packages aren't even close
to being the most effective. The industry standard for tracking,
categorizing, and analyzing all types of viruses isn't the
labs at Symantec or McAffee, it's the venerable technical staff
at the Virus Bulletin, the number one peer-reviewed computer
security journal.
According
to them, the industry leader in virus detection isn't either
of the above-mentioned stand-bys—it's
the relatively unknown, but unmatched utility, Eset Software's
NOD 32—the only product that's been documented as producing
100% detection of “in-the-wild” viruses. In the
VB's most recent test, for example, the best-selling applications,
Norton Antivirus and MacAfee's Netshield missed 11 and 26 data
bugs respectively.
Setting up my laptop with Nod123 was a little more
demanding than simply installing off-the-shelf software for
a single-user, but I imagine that the school IT tech won't
find configuring it any more difficult than the enterprise
versions of the standard Internet security suites.
What really struck me was the greatly superior
speed of NOD 32 as compared to my usual software. On my system,
a full length, in-depth scan of my hard drive can take as long
as an hour and a half. NOD 32, by comparison, took only 12
minutes, plus another 5 for my removable data drives. According
to the manufacturer the product uses significantly fewer system
resources using its compressed algorithm, and, although I didn't
have a benchmarking utility available to test this claim, it
makes perfect sense to me. Given the burden most school's systems
are carrying to comply with the district mandates for virus-resistance,
this streamlining should be a considerably valuable enhancement
of over-all performance for most institutional users.
I've been lucky, and have somehow managed to avoid
any serious attacks by destructive and malicious code, but
schools cannot take that chance. Too much is at stake for any
educational institution. Even those whom have previously obtained
acceptable results should take a serious look at the benefits
Eset Software's exceptional piece of security software engineering,
NOD 32. For more information, log onto the advertiser's site
at www.eset.com.#