TrustPort Antivirus 2013

Some companies blur the line between standalone antivirus and full-scale security suite by adding firewall, antispam, and other suite features to the antivirus. TrustPort Antivirus 2013 ($39.95, direct) sticks with the basics: scanning to remove existing malware problems and monitoring to prevent new attacks. In testing, it proved a lot better at blocking new attacks than at rooting out existing malware infestations.

The 2013 edition's appearance may surprise long-term TrustPort users. Previously, the product's main window displayed quite a bit of information against a background of white and pale blue. The pint-sized user interface for 2013 edition has quite a different color scheme, mostly grays and dark blues, and it displays no status details at all, just four big buttons. Two buttons serve to toggle the on-access scanner and behavior-based Application Inspector on or off. Another launches a check for updates. Clicking the remaining button brings up a menu of choices for an on-demand malware scan.

Setting-tweakers need not despair. Clicking "Open advanced configuration" brings up a dialog of advanced settings with almost exactly the same layout as that of the previous edition. Oh, the color scheme is different, but everything's in roughly the same place.

Impressively Easy Installation
TrustPort installed without a hitch on ten of my twelve malware-infested test systems. As always, ransomware on one system blocked all access to the desktop and start menu, making installation impossible. On another system, a malware process actively terminated the installer process every time it tried to start.

I solved both of these by creating a bootable TrustPort rescue CD on a clean system. I did have to install Microsoft's free Windows Automated Installation Kit, but the resulting CD boots to Windows PE, which is a lot nicer than booting to Linux. After a full scan using the bootable antivirus, I had no trouble finalizing installation of the regular antivirus.

Three Engines
In addition to TrustPort's own antivirus engine, the product also scans using two licensed engines. One, code-named Xenon, comes from Bitdefender; the other, code-named Argon, is from AVG. Triple-scanning does naturally take a bit more system resources than just using one engine, so TrustPort limits how many engines it uses if the system is low on resources.

For testing, I absolutely wanted all three engines active. However, my virtual machine test systems necessarily have a limited amount of RAM and disk space. TrustPort tech support kindly supplied a tweak that allowed me to override the default behavior and enable all three engines.

Unimpressive Malware Removal
As noted, getting TrustPort installed on my malware-infested test systems was easy, and I didn't run into any post-scan problems like those that plagued my testing of G Data AntiVirus 2014. However, when I tallied the results TrustPort failed to impress.

TrustPort detected 69 percent of the samples. That's a tad better than the 67 percent detected by ZoneAlarm Free Antivirus + Firewall 2013, but not a great showing. Of the products tested using this current collection of malware, Kaspersky PURE 3.0 Total Security detected the most?86 percent of them.

Though ZoneAlarm's detection rate lagged behind TrustPort's, it did a better job of actually cleaning up what it detected. ZoneAlarm scored 5.3 points while TrustPort only earned 4.7 points. In a number of cases, one or more malware processes were still running after TrustPort's cleanup. Kaspersky earned 6.0 points in a removal test using the same malware samples.

Tested against my previous malware collection, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware 1.70 and Norton AntiVirus (2013) both detected 89 percent. Norton and Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus 2013 both scored 6.6 points, while Malwarebytes beat all the rest with 7.1 points.

Please read the article How We Test Malware Removal for a full description of my malware removal testing methods.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/vzFPxnhFsZ0/0,2817,2419253,00.asp

braxton miller Whitney Heichel Tippi Hedren Big Tex Sweetest Day optimal Samantha Steele Espn