Goodbye NOD32; Hello Kaspersky!

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.

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We Love You, Rinbot!

It’s not often that we openly sympathize with the virii writers, but this time, it’s too good to be true. Rinbot Generation 7 is targeting Symantec [[SYMC]] and Symantec users – and that’s a good thing.

Anyone using Symantec’s anti-virus software from 2006 and hasn’t updated it is vulnerable to a very powerful complete remote control vulnerability. What does Symantec have to say about it?

Users of Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition and Symantec Client Security should apply the appropriate update as soon as possible, Vincent Weafer, a senior director at Symantec Security Response, said Tuesday. However, because there are no known attacks that exploit the flaw, the need to patch is not urgent, he added.

That’s an excerpt from a c|net article dating all the way back to May of 2006 – a year ago now. Thanks to Symantec’s non-chalance and Turner Broadcasting Systems’ (the owners of CNN) complete disregard for standard IT procedures, they were infected earlier today by Rinbot.

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