Based back in 1992, dr.web is a russian developer with a enormous range of security products for computer systems and cell devices.
Dr.internet anti-virus offers real-time malware detection, behavioural monitoring, and a shocking bonus in a bundled firewall. this receives you packet layer filtering, actual-time tracking of programs, and the potential to customise what any application is permitted to do on-line.
Pricing is, well, complicated. it can be as low as €13 (£eleven.50, $15) for a one computer, one-year licence, in case you choose no technical guide. if this is a step too a long way, the with-assist price doubles to €26 (£23, $30). both options offer deep discounting in case you upload greater users and make bigger the time period. for instance, a 3 device, three-yr licence with tech help costs €87 (£77, $a100).
It would not even forestall there, because dr.net gives a few extraordinary discounts on renewal, starting at 40% off the ordinary rate. long-term clients could save a whole lot of cash.
Dr.internet anti-virus offers real-time malware detection, behavioural monitoring, and a shocking bonus in a bundled firewall. this receives you packet layer filtering, actual-time tracking of programs, and the potential to customise what any application is permitted to do on-line.
Pricing is, well, complicated. it can be as low as €13 (£eleven.50, $15) for a one computer, one-year licence, in case you choose no technical guide. if this is a step too a long way, the with-assist price doubles to €26 (£23, $30). both options offer deep discounting in case you upload greater users and make bigger the time period. for instance, a 3 device, three-yr licence with tech help costs €87 (£77, $a100).
- You can sign up for Dr.Web Anti-virus here
It would not even forestall there, because dr.net gives a few extraordinary discounts on renewal, starting at 40% off the ordinary rate. long-term clients could save a whole lot of cash.
Setup
Dr.internet anti-virus isn't always to be had in trial shape, but the employer does have a down load for its big brother security suite, dr.web safety area.
Trials come in flavours. a beneficiant 3-month licence is available without spending a dime in case you sign up, which basically simply means turning in your email cope with. in case you'd opt to preserve your details non-public, a one-month trial might not ask you for anything at all.
Our down load became a chunky 350mb, however once it arrived the setup method turned into extraordinarily truthful. after once again giving us the selection of trial options, the installer geared up our computer with its numerous additives, downloaded and carried out some updates and brought on us to reboot.
We browsed the dr.net set up and observed a compact set of documents, well organised, and all digitally signed. strangely, there has been best one obvious 0.33-birthday celebration element, a junk mail filter from vade comfy. this is a superb sign, because it suggests a agency that’s growing its own technology in-residence, which must ensure that the diverse components work well together.
Dr.net makes use of a couple of technologies to protect its files from interference by using malware, seemingly including a ‘hypervisor element’. we're not quite positive what that involves, however it become more than sufficient to guard the program from our easy assaults. something we did, methods stayed jogging, offerings refused to prevent and documents could not be deleted. dr.web wasn't going to be disabled without difficulty.
Features
the dr.web interface is one of the most fundamental we've got seen; it’s little more than a menu displayed from a gadget tray icon. for a few motive, the scanner option you'll use most often is right at the bottom of the listing, but once you've got noticed it, an explicit, complete or custom test is just more than one clicks away.
dr.net's specific test isn't as speedy as its name shows, certainly it took approaching 9 minutes to study our test device (maximum applications take round four or 5 minutes, a few are a lot quicker). accuracy was proper, with this system detecting everything we threw at it. but dr.internet's awareness on ‘potentially undesirable packages’ additionally generated many extra questionable detections than common, in addition to highlighting our hosts record as infected simply because it wasn't the windows default.
Scanning our sample Program Files folder also took longer than most of the competition. But again, all our carefully positioned threats were picked up, and this time there were no false alarms.
Dr.Web Anti-virus doesn't have a URL filter, unfortunately – that's reserved for the Security Space suite. That means there's no protection from phishing, although malware should be picked up anyway via the regular file and download scanners.
The program is supposed to have a firewall, but at first we couldn't find a reference to it anywhere. We poked around, searched here and there – but found nothing. We browsed the local Help file, which proved disappointing: it told us about the firewall, but not how or where it could be launched.
Finally, we opened the Windows Programs and Features applet, clicked Dr.Web Security Space, hit Change, and found an option to install the firewall. For some reason it wasn't included on our system by default, but having found its hiding place, we were able to try it out.
We rebooted, and the firewall asked us if we wanted to allow a particular process to go online. And then it asked about another. And another, and another. This is a part of the training process and won't necessarily go on forever, but it's clearly going to be too technical for many users. Here, for example, is part of the Help file describing what to do with these alerts:
“In certain cases, Windows does not allow to explicitly identify a service that is run as a system process. When a connection attempt of a system service is detected, take notice of the port used for the connection. If the used application can address this port, allow the connection.”
There's no way the average user will be able to recognise a system service, and be sure that “the used application can address this port", and understand the possible consequences of refusing the connection to a particular process. The fact that this is in the Help file – this is what Dr.Web thinks is sufficient guidance for end users on setting up the firewall – tells us they're not thinking at all about typical home users.
There's a similar focus on technical features over usability elsewhere. We expected to be able to access logs of scan results directly from the Dr.Web interface. Instead we had to piece together details from a text file on our hard drive, the Windows Event Logs and some partial Dr.Web reports.
The program offers some compensations for experts. Digging into the settings reveals some interesting low-level ways to define what Dr.Web allows or blocks on your system. Do you want to prevent HOSTS file edits, low-level disk access, Safe Mode changes, stop programs setting themselves up to run with Windows, or maybe resetting executable file associations? It's all here, and a lot more.
If you're a security novice, or just don't want to get into the low-level details, none of that will matter very much. You'll still be able to use the basics of the program without much difficulty, but it's not as easy to use as it could be.
Protection
Dr.Web Anti-virus found and removed all our test threats without difficulty, but it wasn't all good news. The program also raised many alerts for software that was mostly or entirely harmless.
Our tests can highlight major issues about a package, but they're not comprehensive enough to accurately rank antivirus detection rates. Benchmarks like AV-Comparatives' Real-World Protection Test can show there's as little as 0.5% between the detection rates of the top 10 antivirus programs, and reliably placing those in order requires testing hundreds, even thousands of the very latest malware samples, on a regular basis.
The difficulty with Dr.Web is that the company hasn't been assessed by any of the big testing labs for a very long time (AV-Comparatives hasn’t looked at it since 2007). There simply isn't any data out there to help verify Dr.Web's abilities.
Given this, if you're a non-technical user looking for the best possible detection rates, Dr.Web is hard to recommend. It worked well for us, but we can't say with confidence whether it's the most accurate antivirus around, or the fifth, or the tenth best.
If you're an antivirus expert who will appreciate Dr.Web's abilities, and are happy to carry out your own tests, it's a different story. There's a lot to like here, and the company is much more transparent about the techniques and technologies it uses than some of the competition. Check out the ‘Anti-virus engine technologies’ and ‘Preventive protection’ pages to get a feel for what the package can do.
Final verdict
An interesting antivirus which combines multiple powerful low-level technologies to keep you safe. It's not for beginners and we'd like to see it assessed by the independent testing labs, but security experts should check out Dr.Web Antivirus anyway – there's a lot to like here.
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