Dr Web has released the 6.0 version of their antivirus program. The biggest change is anti-root kit technology to protect against rouge 64 bit drivers. The scanner has also been revamped to provide more efficient scanning, there is a fully functioning firewall with trusted application protection, and also an email protection system. The program has been awarded for its detection rates (has almost 2 million virus traces in this version) and also has a real time shield, SpIDer Guard.
The installation of Dr Web 6.0 was fairly straightforward. The download is 71 megabytes in size yet only uses about 90 megabytes of disk space. The installer constantly reminds one of conflicting antivirus but doesn’t actually detect or is able to remove it. Keep in mind that the program needs to install a firewall driver, so one will need to accept the security warning. The installer also runs an express scan before completing, but launches a new window to do so (this needs to be exited out before the installation can continue). Finally a restart is required before the program is fully functional.
Dr Web 6.0 offers three main scanning options the express, complete (full system), and custom scans. I really like how the exact locations of the scan are listed which doesn’t leave one guessing about what’s being checked. I also like how the virus definitions versions are date stamped with even the exact time to ensure the latest protection. As far as scanning speed, it doesn’t seem to have improved significantly from the previous version and is about 5.5 megabytes per second (slightly faster than the average free antivirus). The express scan finished in 18 minutes and scanned about 20,000 files in the process. The virus scanner didn’t detect any viruses or false positives on the test system.
In addition to a good scanning engine, Dr Web 6.0 has an impressive firewall. It includes trusted interface protection, a rule based firewall (packet level filtering via specific ports and protocols including IP version 6 and TCP, UDP, ICMP, IGMP etc. plus MAC address level filtering), application and parent process filtering, and different firewall modes [training (the default automatic mode via a trusted database), interactive etc]. In practice, I wasn’t prompted for any firewall alerts but if one wants a large level of customization it’s there. I also liked the easy restore defaults option if mistakes are made.
There are some nifty features in the settings menu. The extended protections include an option to protect the host file against modifications, the option to protect critical system, block automatic changes to Dr.Web’s settings, and to block applications from using low level disk functions. Unfortunately, these options are selected by default therefore I encourage one to enable them.
Dr Web 6.0 resource usage is quite high. The program used approximately 200 megabytes while idle and an additional 101 megabytes for the scanning engine. CPU usage varied from 9 to 14 percent. Even though the resource usage is quite high, the test system performance was surprisingly not affected . It appears that if a system has the available system RAM then the program is actually quite efficient.
My biggest complaint about Dr Web 6.0 is there isn’t a main interface screen that displays the status of the antivirus. Everything is instead handled from the tray application with submenus. The program relies on tooltips to alert the user to the antivirus status levels. I hope that in future versions the publisher can include a home screen of sorts.
