Product Review:
Eset Software's NOD 321 Antivirus
by Mitchell Levine

A scary statistic: according to technology analysts at International Data Corp., computer viruses cost businesses world wide an estimated $55 billion. Just to take one egregious recent instance, the well-publicized Slammer worm alone cost affected industries in the United States and abroad between $930 million and $1.2 billion in just its first five days of operation.

While those projected statistics probably don't take the field of education in consideration specifically, it's difficult to believe that our schools remain unaffected. Most readers of this section most likely believe that they are doing a reasonably diligent job of staying on top of the problem, and it's true that some factors are primarily beyond the control of the average user: numerous security flaws in the most popular operating systems have contributed substantially to the crisis. “I've installed a top-selling security suite, and I have a software firewall,” you might say, “I'm covered.”

Well, it turns out that name recognition isn't the assurance that you might think. Believe it or don't, the most frequently used and best known packages aren't even close to being the most effective. The industry standard for tracking, categorizing, and analyzing all types of viruses isn't the labs at Symantec or McAffee, it's the venerable technical staff at the Virus Bulletin, the number one peer-reviewed computer security journal.

According to them, the industry leader in virus detection isn't either of the above-mentioned stand-bys—it's the relatively unknown, but unmatched utility, Eset Software's NOD 32—the only product that's been documented as producing 100% detection of “in-the-wild” viruses. In the VB's most recent test, for example, the best-selling applications, Norton Antivirus and MacAfee's Netshield missed 11 and 26 data bugs respectively.

Setting up my laptop with Nod123 was a little more demanding than simply installing off-the-shelf software for a single-user, but I imagine that the school IT tech won't find configuring it any more difficult than the enterprise versions of the standard Internet security suites.

What really struck me was the greatly superior speed of NOD 32 as compared to my usual software. On my system, a full length, in-depth scan of my hard drive can take as long as an hour and a half. NOD 32, by comparison, took only 12 minutes, plus another 5 for my removable data drives. According to the manufacturer the product uses significantly fewer system resources using its compressed algorithm, and, although I didn't have a benchmarking utility available to test this claim, it makes perfect sense to me. Given the burden most school's systems are carrying to comply with the district mandates for virus-resistance, this streamlining should be a considerably valuable enhancement of over-all performance for most institutional users.

I've been lucky, and have somehow managed to avoid any serious attacks by destructive and malicious code, but schools cannot take that chance. Too much is at stake for any educational institution. Even those whom have previously obtained acceptable results should take a serious look at the benefits Eset Software's exceptional piece of security software engineering, NOD 32. For more information, log onto the advertiser's site at www.eset.com.#