Let me start out by I’ve never been one that has really used or tried many cloud antiviruses. Hitman Pro and Panda Cloud are the two that I’m used to, and use all the time in terms to cleaning up virus infections, though Panda I had for a short time on my desktop when it was still Windows XP. It was lightweight and protected me from a lot of viruses, so I was happy to be using it. I switched away from it only because of the fact I decided to make my desktop system Linux only. And while I don’t know exactly how they work one hundred percent other then uploading files to a remote server and checking them for viruses. Aside from that, I don’t know how any antivirus works… but the truth is, most times we don’t need to know how something works to protect us. I might not understand how MBAM or ESET finds a virus on my system, but I’m glad that it can and that it does. At the end of the day, the thing that matters that it does work. To this extent, I recently tried a newer cloud based anti-malware, named PREVX, and see how well it worked.

To say the least, it was a very interesting experience. I downloaded Eicar and Spycar, the test virus/malwares, and Prevx completely ignored Eicar while it was compressed, no matter how many layers of compression was used. This was using the on-demand scan because of the fact that I hadn’t the realtime scanner to test with. At the same time, it also ignored four of the Spycar test files, out of a possible 18. IT did detect the other ones in a right click scan, and was able to remove them all without any problems. However, it did strike me as odd that Prevx was more willing to delete the test files that didn’t add anything to the autostart menus then anything else. Because I use a layered setup, WinPatrol was able to block all of them without fail.

Tests aside, I then tried dealing with the real deal: Vundo and Conficker. I still had the samples lying around from the last time I had to clean my buddy’s computer with Hitman Pro. Turning off ESET, and using Prevx’s scanning abilities, it was able to find and destroy the samples I had, and the backup samples that I had forgotten about on the external hard drive. It did miss a private virus that I didn’t expect it to pick up, however, ESET and MBAM also missed it too.


Malware Detected

I was also told it was good against active malware, so on my Salix box, I installed a copy of Windows XP as well as some nasty scareware/malware that would otherwise be hard to remove normally. Sure enough PREVX detected and deleted the stuff that would reproduce at boot and left a nearly clean system. I say nearly because while it didn’t fully remove one of the malware products completely, it did manage to make it unstartable, so I was able to use Add/Remove to remove it.

Overall, PREVX has done rather well, controlling and facing off against viruses and malware without any major issues. The interesting thing to note, however, is the fact that I was using a version that was not meant to replace the AVs, but meant to be another step with an antivirus, like MBAM or SuperAntispyware. To this means, it did above and beyond what it needed to. And today’s surprise is the fact that I’m giving away a one year license of PREVX like the one I tested, that offers malware removal and realtime infection monitoring but not realtime protection. You should not run this without an antivirus, but like MBAM Pro, it will block a lot of the malware you face. All you have to do is post below. However, if you’d like a chance to win a second license, feel free to sign up for the forum for Leofelix’s giveaway! I will announce the winners of this draw on Thursday 24th, 2010… so don’t be late, or you might just end up regretting it!


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