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 TruPrevent Review
May 14, 2005 - Part I
by Andrew Cooper
Preface
Considering the fact that traditional antiviruses, with their signature-based virus detection mechanisms, often fail to recognize emerging threats and newly-born viruses, I decided to do a little test. There's a new trend in virus-protection, sometimes referred to as "sandbox", which is a set of preventive algorithms that detects viruses based on the intelligent analysis of the file's code, not just on the past history of established virus samples. Unlike traditional antivirus programs that rely exclusively on submitted virus patterns, sandbox technology actually scrutinizes the file's code and determines what it purports to do. If it discovers a file containing only a benign code that won't cause any harm, it flags such a file as "clean" and doesn't block it. On the other hand, if it spots fragments of a code that are potentially destructive, it flags that file as "infected" (or as a "virus") and won't let it start.
Since this technology is still in its early stages, few products of this type exist on the market today, one of them being Panda Software's TruPrevent Personal 2005, which we're about to take a look at now.
As stated by the authors of the program, TP is only meant to complement another, traditional antivirus solution. If for whatever reason your primary antivirus omits the "bad" file or program, TruPrevent will jump in and try to identify and disinfect it.
Installation, first-time run
Full installation was completed in just under a minute, during which the program did a "quick" virus scan on my system, finding zero viruses. Then, as usual, I was asked to restart the machine, which I did. After rebooting, I updated the program through its "Intelligent Update" feature and downloaded an additional 4,5 Mbs of data, making a total of approximately 22 Mbs of downloadable data, including the program's installation package.
The program itself is quite unobtrusive, with just a little icon of a panda's face looking up from the Windows Tray Bar. TP doesn't boast large number of settings, and the necessary ones have already been enabled by the program's authors. By double-clicking the panda on your tray, you can bring up the settings window. Here's what's in there:
- An option to enable protection from unknown threats
- An option to enable protection while surfing the Net
You can also view the list of unknown viruses blocked by the program from that window. And, by clicking the activity report from the traybar icon, you can look over a list of all past activities performed by the program.
I should warn you all immediately that TruPrevent is not a virus scanner per se, and it doesn't allow a user to choose specific places for scanning viruses. TP is a monitoring and prevention tool that can deny access to, or execution of, a potentially malicious file.
Read next:
Continue to Part II
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