IDG News Service,
Buenos Aires Bureau
BUENOS AIRES –
The Japanese
data security company Trend Micro Inc. is offering a free antivirus scanning
system for on the spot online detection at their Web address http://housecall.antivirus.com/housecall/. We
reviewed it on occasion of their having set a Spanish language service in
association with Hispasec Sistemas, Madrid. This report is on their main
service in English, that we tested after their Spanish language counterpart.
Trend Micro is
a software company that specializes in antivirus solutions for the corporate
and network environments. At the final user level its most popular product is
the PC-cillin antivirus scanner.
We tested
their free Housecall antivirus system that claims to check your computer
through the Web, on the fly. It does so using Active-X controls (for Internet
Explorer 4.0 and above) or Java applets (for Netscape browsers).
We confess
that on our first try we were not impressed at all. Using a high speed
cable-modem connection, the system needed 12 minutes to download the virus
signature files, and 5 additional minutes for downloading the Active-X
controls. These provide an on-screen display of your local disks, in a way akin
to the Windows Explorer. You can check
the directories or files that you want checked for viruses, and HouseCall
performs the scanning and cleaning after it downloads its files.
On our first
try we checked our data partition (7.5G bytes, almost 3G bytes of data files).
This is a 7500 rpm Maxtor 54098HB disk on a 700 MHz Pentium III machine. The
scan is done locally, using the HouseCall applet. The software scanned 7920
files in a trifle less than 5 minutes. It found 17 infected files in the e-mail
Attachments folder. All of them were of the new e-mail sort of viruses,
including the most recent one: Anna Kournikova, and a few old favorites, like
Pretty Park and I love you. None of this viruses had spread to other sections
(see accompanying story, Opinion...)
The system indicated whether the files were "cleanable" and offer an
option to delete or clean the files.
The second try
was with the C drive, that holds the active programs. This is also a 7.5G byte
partition, with a little more than 4G bytes of files. The system analyzed
57,516 files in 14 minutes. It found no viruses, Trojan horses or worms there.
The scanning
times seem rather slow. However, it must be consider that HouseCall analyzes
all files. There is no check box for selecting file extensions. This is
reasonable, since nowadays viruses can infect most types of files, including
.doc, .xls, and others. So this all inclusive approach seems sensible enough.
Today we
connected again to the HouseCall site. This time, setting the whole system for
virus detection needed about 30 seconds. Obviously there was little, if any,
updating of the virus signatures files to do, and the applet was already
loaded.
Conclusion:
Trend Micro's offer is good and practical. It guarantees that the virus
definitions are always current, and you can check your files from anywhere, as
long as you can get an Internet connection. It is good for people on the go,
for checking their portables, without having to load and maintain a full
antivirus program on board. It also checks compressed files, and e-mail
attachments. However, if you are going to use it while traveling, be sure to
download the main files first, so that you have shorter wait times for the
updated files when you connect off base.
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