2006 Antivirus Review

Kaspersky 9.0

Installation:

Kaspersky 6 won’t install without Windows Service Pack 1. This conflicts with our security implementation recommendation of installing virus protection and firewall software before attaching your computer to the Internet. Unless you have another means of updating your computer with Service Pack 1 without being connected to the Internet we do not recommend you use this product for a new computer install.

Configuration:

The application forces you to decide how often you want to update the product which, as we will learn later, doesn’t really matter. It gives the appearance that it updates the product and virus definitions during the installation. It asks the installer if you want to use ‘Interactive Defense Options’ which is a more dynamic security observation method in which the computer user will have to more aware of what they are running and be prepared to tell Kaspersky weather the reported activity is safe or not. We didn’t like the configuration to perform a scan during every boot, but other than that most of the configuration was setup for us.

Resources:

The application takes approximately 25mb on the hard drive, and we were able to identified only two system processes that run in the back ground using a total of only 5mb of system resources. A full system scan took only 18 minutes, for our 4gig drive, and used most of the CPU resources during the scan. Below are the system processes we identified.

AVP.EXE 2.1mb

AVP.EXE 3.0MB

Ability:

The program failed to stop three of ten viruses from planting on the hard drive. Even after verifying the application was up to date and running full system scan, it still left three viruses wreaking havoc on the hard drive. It's important to note that the seven viruses Kaspersky did detect did make it to the hard drive and were not detected for atleast thirty seconds in each situation.

	Real-Time	Full Scan
AOL Trojan	YES	NA
Backdoor – Ambush	YES	NA
DOS-Misoska	YES	NA
Email-LoveLetter	NO	NO
Exploit-GetAdmin	YES	NA
IM Worm-Jitux	YES	NA
MSOfficeVirus-Darkstar	NO	NA
Nuke-Genocide	YES	NA
Trojan-FakeGina	YES	NA
Worm-Doomjuice	NO	NO

(Real-Time: This is the preferred detection method. The virus was stopped as it entered the computer, before it planted itself onto any media such as the hard drive. Full Scan: The virus planted itself onto the media of the computer such as a folder on the hard drive and was found during a scheduled Full Scan. NA means the Full Scan was not needed.)

Uninstalling:
After a reboot, no residue was found. Clean uninstall.

Support:
They offer email support, knowledge base, and a technical support toll free phone number.

Price & Options:
$49.95 for 1 year of the standard antivirus package.

Other Notes:
There is a graph that displays the benefit of Kaspersky is better than Norton because Kaspersky updates once an hour. We believe updating once a day and stopping viruses is much better than updating once an hour and missing three out of ten tested.