The antivirus suite came out with a 99.9 percent score on the much larger malware test with nearly 11,000 samples.ĮSETs results were a little different with AV-Comparatives. In August 2017, it scored 100 percent in performance against zero-day malware attacks, web, and email threats based on nearly 200 samples. ESET got high marks from AV-Test in its malware tests. Overall ESET provides a lot of protection, but what really matters is how it performs. IDGĮSET’s banking and payment protection feature.

By default, Office files aren’t sent to the cloud for analysis, for example, which is a nice balance between cloud security and user privacy. ESET’s is called LiveGrid, which the company says tries to take your privacy into account. On top of that, ESET offers cloud-based protection analysis-a common feature in all modern antivirus suites and one that was central to the recent Kasperksy controversy. There’s also a network-attack protection feature to stop threats that try to spread through your home network, an “exploit blocker” that monitors apps that are commonly exploitable, an “advanced memory scanner” (in ESET Smart Security) to go after any malware hiding in RAM, and a UEFI scanner to guard against low-level malware. ESET says the suite won’t interfere with most mainstream encryption tools, but if you were using something less well-known it may see a temporary stoppage. I asked the company if that means ESET would temporarily stop utilities like TrueCrypt. If it detects anything, it will alert the user and ask whether they initiated this action. The security suite regularly scans for ransomware-like behavior such as mass encryption of files. Like many other services these days, ESET offers an anti-ransomware feature to block one of the more pernicious threats out there. PerformanceĪlthough most of its features happen in the background, ESET, the company, has a lot to say about what its products can do. Overall, ESET’s interface is easy to understand, manage, and navigate, making it a great choice for someone who doesn’t want a complicated power-user interface. You can also set it to carry out the action, such as scan now, every time you insert a USB drive into your PC-probably a good idea for most users.

Instead, it asks if you want to scan the drive now or later-there’s also an option to dive into ESET’s settings to turn off this feature. The pop-up doesn’t prevent you from accessing the USB drive. On top of the interface features, ESET also has a pop-up that appears each time you insert a USB storage device into your PC.

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