Bkav is a new antivirus company based in Vietnam. Given that the company isn’t well known the most surprising thing, is that the antivirus engine is VB100 certified. This means that Bkav has excellent protection against the latest viruses in the wild. This is also due to the face that the antivirus connects to the cloud for zero day threats. What’s also commendable is that the interface is quite streamlined which again is unexpected. Finally, Bkav Professional also includes USB drive, registry, behavior, and self defense protection.
The installation of Bkav Professional was moderate. The initial download was 1.7 megabytes in size and then proceeded to download the full internet security program. The setup has some problems when one wants to change the installation directory. The difficulty is that one can’t make a new folder inside the included file browser so one will have to manually use explorer to create it first. The installer didn’t have any problems on the Windows 7 64 bit test system (rare for new antivirus)and required a restart to finish.
Bkav Professional has 4 different scanning options the quick, full, multiple drives, and the option to choose a directory. Depending on the scan, options including heuristics, critical areas, startup objects, and autorun objects are selected or deselected. One can also select whether they want the windows directory or documents folder scanned. The virus scanner first needs to connect to the cloud which takes four to six minutes. Once done, the program scans at approximately 3 megabytes per second which is slightly slower than the average free antivirus. The first detection was a “junk†or unusable executable and offered to delete it. The file, RKPavProc64.sys was a leftover component from a Panda installation. One annoying thing is that the status bar doesn’t indicate the progress of the scan, it simply moves. In addition, to the customization settings mentioned above, there is the smart scan option which utilizes a memory scan. In the advanced scanning options, Bkav Professional has a deep, rootkit, spyware and adware, keylogger, packed files scans, and remove macro option. These settings can be customized according to one’s preferences.
In addition, to good scanning capability Bkav Professional includes a firewall. However, the firewall really needs some work as far as how its presented to the user. The menu option really gives no indication of the functionality accept the ability to add or remove a process. I would like to see what programs are auto detected as safe in future versions. The schedule scan option is nice in that one can schedule any one of the 4 scans to run at boot or a specific interval. There is a report and update function but otherwise few additional features.
Bkav Professional uses about 43 megabytes of RAM while idle and doesn’t affect system operation (one will be unaware that its actually there). When scanning the program uses an additional 95 megabytes of RAM and about 12 percent CPU power. This figures are about what the average competitor uses.