ESET Smart Security 7 – Review + settings

ESET Smart Security 7

Malware detection rate is very good.

Proactive protection is very good and is done without asking users. Very effectively suppresses new active malwares.

Easy to use.

Impact on system performance is low

A lot of settings that can be done.

Scan speed is fast.

FEATURES

Antivirus
Antispyware
Anti-Theft
Anti-Phishing
Personal Firewall
Antispam
Parental Control
Social Media Scanner
Exploit Blocker
Advanced Memory Scanner
Vulnerability Shield
Device Control

Exploit Blocker is designed to fortify often exploited application types on users’ systems, such as web browsers, PDF readers, email client or MS office components. It adds another layer of protection by using a completely different technology, compared to techniques focusing on detection of malicious files themselves…

Instead, it monitors behavior of processes and watches for suspicious activities that are typical for exploits. When triggered, the suspicious behavior is analyzed and the threat might be blocked immediately on the machine. Certain suspicious activities are processed further in our cloud systems, which gives Exploit Blocker the potential to protect users against targeted attacks and previously unknown exploits, so called zero-day attacks.

Advanced Memory Scanner couples nicely with Exploit Blocker, as it is also designed to strengthen the protection against modern malware. In an effort to evade detection, malware writers extensively use file obfuscation or/and encryption. This causes problems with unpacking and might pose a challenge to bypass for ordinary anti-malware techniques, such as emulation or heuristics. To tackle this problem, the Advanced Memory Scanner monitors the behavior of a malicious process and scans it once it decloaks in the memory. This allows for effective infection prevention even from heavily obfuscated malware.

Vulnerability shield is an extension of firewall and improves detection of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE’s) on the network level.

By implementing detections for CVE’s of widely used protocols, such as SMB, RPC and RDP, it constitutes another important layer of protection against spreading malware, network-conducted attacks and exploitations of vulnerabilities for which a patch has not been released or deployed yet.

ESET LiveGrid – Built on ThreatSense.NET® advanced early warning system, ESET LiveGrid® utilizes data that ESET users have submitted worldwide and sends it to ESET’s Virus Lab. ESET Virus Lab specialists then use the information to build an accurate snapshot of the nature and scope of global threats in order to release relevant updates to our virus signature database, keeping ESET adaptive to the latest threats.

Moreover, it implements a reputation system that helps to improve the overall efficiency of our anti-malware solutions. When an executable file or archive is being inspected on user’s system, its hash tag is first compared against a database of white- and blacklisted items.

If it is found on the whitelist, the inspected file is considered clean and also flagged to be excluded from future scans. If it is on the blacklist, appropriate actions are taken – based on the nature of the threat. Only if no match was found, the file is scanned thoroughly. Based on results of this scan the file becomes a candidate to extend the corresponding list. This approach has a significant positive impact on scanning performance.

This reputation system allows for effective detection of malware samples even before their signatures are delivered to user’s computer in via updated virus database (which happens several times a day).