We have reviewed many other Comodo Security products in the past. Comodo basically only provides free security software. In addition, all of their security software have very slick interfaces etc. So, I guess the question is how to they provide it for free. Well, Comodo Cloud Scanner comes bundled with Comodo’s Live Support application. However, the application is non intrusive and only prompts the user if they would like additional help from the service.
The Comodo Cloud Scanner works on the premise of the cloud antivirus. The scanner first does a quick scan to identify suspicious or unknown files on a system compared to a database of good a bad files (essentially Norton insight). Once suspicious or malware are identified the user has the option to upload the potential viruses to Comodo servers for analysis. The key here is that Comodo can run a battery of checks on each file (including executing each file) because they have expansive computing power at their disposal which may include many virus scanning engines. On the other hand, a private user is only limited to one or two virus scanners.
The initial virus scan took about 20 seconds and found 4 potential viruses. In addition, the Comodo Cloud Scanner application only used 30 megabytes of memory and maybe 1 percent of CPU power. This makes Comodo Cloud Scanner a very unobtrusive virus scanner.
Once the initial virus scan is finished. The user is given the option to run a deeper scan. The deeper scan takes about 30 minutes to complete and used about 14 percent CPU power. I’m assuming that the “deeper scan†is more of a traditional virus scan. Regardless, the scanner detected 150 suspicious files on the test system. I waded through each sample and I can confirm that they are all legit regardless of the suspicious nature. This is kind of a lot of false positives and could be overbearing to a users with slow internet connections.
In addition, to the free antivirus engine. Comodo Cloud Scanner also includes a privacy sweeper, registry fixer, and a junk file cleaner. I want to pay special attention to the registry cleaner because I think it does a really good job at safely and quickly cleaning the registry. I use several registry cleaners including CCleaner and Auslogics. Comodo still found invalid entries. That’s a pretty amazing feat.
One final thing to mention. If one launches the Live Support application it will attempt to install a Windows service. I don’t really agree with this behavior because it is another way to bog down a system without a users knowledge.
