August 2005 — Features
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How to Keep Your Campus Safe from Infection
Web site: www.mcafee.com
Local office: Santa Clara, CA
Price: $39.99
Download file size: N/A (Has online installer; hard to tell the size, but I would guess it is quite large.)
Virus samples: virus_research@nai.com
Support: 800-338-8754 (24/7)
Comments: This is a great interface for someone who has no computer knowledge; it looks pretty easy to use with very limited options. This program is quite a drain on resources, and it locked up the computer when unzipping my viruses. Its interface encourages you to buy other security products. Very slow scan speed when scanning a single file. It also scans about 35 extra system files making it agonizingly slow. After sending several of the samples, McAfee e-mailed back saying they were new viruses, but its software still did not detect them a week later. When McAfee e-mailed back the results, they included an updated definition called extended.dat. However, they didn’t send any instructions regarding what to do with it. After searching with no results for an existing file by the same name, I put it in the folder with the clean.dat and the scan.dat file, but it did not seem to do anything even after a reboot.
Web site: www3.ca.com/Solutions/Product.asp?ID=156
Local office: Islandia, NY
Virus samples: virus@ca.com
Support: 866-422-2774 (24/7)
Price: $29.95
File size: 17.2 MBuncompressed (It came on a CD provided to me by CA.)
Comments: This program kept locking up. When I rebooted the computer, the SP2 fire wall prompted me to allow eTrust to connect to the Internet, but it still didn’t run properly until I completely disabled the firewall. eTrust has two different scan engines you can choose, although neither one of them found my viruses. The options available were few to moderate. It took a lot of work to get this product to function, only to have it find one new virus. The company’s Web page is difficult to navigate, which is why I gave you a direct link to the product (these guys market a ton of solutions). You must disable the SP2 firewall or manually set permissions to update.
Web site: www.kaspersky.com
