Comodo Antiviral Suite, and end users review.

Overall Score: 97%

Imagine this: An antiviral suite, which competes with the regular commercial virus-scanners on equal technological merits.

What merits are those, you ask?

Well, for beginners:
-Constant up-to-date using daily automatic database upgrades
-User friendly graphical control panels
-Proactive Heuristic analysis intercepts unknown threats
-Constantly protects with real-time On Access scanning online

These are just the highlights.

Oh, and I forgot one “edge” it has over the comptetition. A feature the comptetition has completely forgotten about:

-Comodo AntiVirus 1.1 beta, all subsequent beta versions and the final release version will each be available free to both home and business users.

Now, I can literally hear the question you readers are asking: What’s the catch?

Well, as far as I have looked, there isn’t one. Comodo makes it’s money elsewhere, as one of the world’s leading Certification Authority is setting the standard for Identity and Trust Assurance online. Thus: Giving away a suite of firewall, antivirus, and other security goodies is actually good for Comodo Business, since getting those products out there helps Comodo running a “safe web for everyone”.

This is why Comodo’s antiviral suite differs from rival OPENSOURCE projects, by actually having a support network.

Now, I can here another question coming. It’s sounding like: Wow, this is great! Is there a downside to all this?

The answer here, has to be a yes and no answer, since the product is still in its beta phase, and thus unfinished: The finished product may have resolved this problem.

Currently the downside is that the Comodo antiviral suite (as opposed to the Comodo Firewall) does not register with the Windows XP Security Centre, so Windows firmly believes that you are running your system without an antivirus suite. It’s no biggie, and telling the security system that you are running a solution you can monitor for yourself is one mouseclick away. Yet the message from Microsoft that you “are at risk” will (needlessly) scare some users away, especially the less technical users. This is way I subtract 2 of the 3% from the overall score.

The only other downside, is that it is another piece of closed source software. The reason this is only worth 1% to me, is that it’s running on a massive closed source operating system KNOWN to have several bugs. Had the antiviral suite been running on an opensourced box (where there has been some code review!), the score reduction would have been a LOT higher than 1%.

So what is the verdict?

This BETA project is ready for deployment on all computers used by users who understand enough NOT to be scared about Windows Security Centre not finding the antiviral program. Thus it’s not ready for users who’d rather not disable a part of window’s “self-check” system.

The final version (If it integrates properly with the security system) will probably find its way onto a majority of computers, given the horrendous prices some of the competition is charging per month for similar products.

If set up in team with the rest of the comodo suite, such as the antispam and the firewall solution, it is more than ready to “face the internet”.

Download it, and try it today. It’s free, and hence (if you remember the old mantra about always taking backups!) totally risk free, since you don’t risk your investment in other software (that can be reinstalled should you decide Comodo is not for you).

//Svein

Ex Telecoms Security Engineer (retired due to health)