Protect Your ASSets!

A virus is a piece of self-replicating code; in other words, it is software which is designed to copy itself. You would think that software creators would have something more productive to do with their time. But since some have chose the tainted route, we have tools which help us to ward off those evil buggers.

Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus is a neat utility package from S&S Software International. It discovers, identifies, and repairs the damage caused by thousands of viruses, including the most complex encrypted and polymorphic (multiple forms) viruses. It also detects macro viruses and those pesky trojans.

I tested Anti-Virus on a Windows 3.11, Windows 95, and Windows NT 4.0 machine. I also tested this baby on my Microsoft Exchange mail server and on Microsoft Outlook. (Yes, I DO have a LIFE!) I put it to the test against Norton Antivirus and McAfee Antivirus to find some well-known and hard to detect viruses. Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus found all of them but Norton and McAfee came up a tad short. One of the joys of this utility is that it adds detection and cleaning capabilities for 150-200 new viruses per month. The Anti-Virus software includes a scheduler to run the virus finder without you having to specifically run the program. In this way, you don't have to 'think' about being protected. This tool has a 99% chance of finding any virus as long as you keep the software up to date by downloading the most up to date virus killing patch. Check out Dr. Solomon's site for a virus education.

One feature that I found of great use is the ability for Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus to also scan compressed files such as *.zip, *.arc, *.arj, *.ice, etc. Super duper stuff here!

The software comes with a set of very informative and easy to follow manuals: a manual for your specific operating system, a DOS/Windows manual, and a Virus Encyclopedia. The Operating System specific manual includes general information on viruses, trojans, installation, options, guarding against viruses, checking for viruses, virus repair/removal, scheduler, advanced virus detection/prevention, toolkit configuration, and reference information. The Virus Encyclopedia shows details of how common and infectious a virus is, the damage it causes, the changes it may make to your *.com and *.exe files, memory residency, stealth capability, encryption, payload, aliases and variants.

Their claim is that "You get a free automatic update to the most current version of the software, plus you can get an optional plan that provides ongoing monthly online updates to protect you from the hundreds of new viruses that appear every month. With Dr Solomon's, if a virus strikes, you're not alone; we provide 24-hour virus emergency support - live with one of our technical experts on the phone."

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