Virus Chaser = Good or Bad

[TSR]

I am considering on purchasing a license for Virus chaser as I have tried it out and like it. However I would appreicate some advice and input from the members if they have used this software? Pro's and cons are appreciated. I have tried numerous anti-virus software's out but this appears to be the most friendly to my system . Here is the main web site for Virus Chaser for those that are curious. Thanks in advance :D
click here (http://www.viruschaser.com/Eng/index.jsp)

[nihil]

The product is South Korean................using a Russian engine from Dialogue Science, who I have known for some years.

I have downloaded it and will put it through it's paces tomorrow

Cheers

[TSR]

Originally posted here (http://www.AntiOnline.com/showthread.php?threadid=#post) by nihil
The product is South Korean................using a Russian engine from Dialogue Science, who I have known for some years.

I have downloaded it and will put it through it's paces tomorrow

Cheers Appreciate your response, have you arrived a a conclusion about Virus Chaser, as I have been using it for about a week now and have found it very user friendly for starters. Low on memory consumption and very fast scan. Have a good day

[GrApHiCTrOn]

i just downloaded i think im goint to start testing it :D

[nihil]

Hi,

Would have replied earlier but the power went down in the middle of it..............we are having 90Mph winds at the moment (the pleasures of living beside the sea :( )

I am having a bit of trouble with it, and need to investigate further.

The labrat I chose is a PII/266 with 128Mb RAM and two HDDS 2.1 & 6.4. I guess that there is about 4.5 gig of data on them. It is running Windows Me with all relevant patches and updates applied.

It took 1hour 17 minutes to do a full scan................................AVG takes 25 minutes. I will re-test that in safe mode to get a cleaner comparison, it could just be that AVG is more aggressive about grabbing resource?

There is no useful help that I can find. When I try to get the online help I get a black screen and have to hit enter to get it back up. It then shows me the contents of my "C" drive in IE!!! and keeps returning to the black screen.

Something not quite right there?............I need to look a bit closer.

The autoupdate worked well, and is incremental, so you don't have to download the whole lot and the engine each time.

It reads .txt files and found a .txt copy of Startpage.57344..............I let it "clean" it and it promptly deleted it for me :( That is not "cleaning" in my book? I need to look at that a bit further, as it did not seem to find the executable?????............I will have to reload the nasties from the floppy I captured them to.

I will try it on a different machine, as I suspect that it might also be having problems with my Agnitum Firewall.

I would not rush to buy it just yet. I would personally be happier with PC-cillin or McAfee right now.

Cheers

[TSR]

Hi nihil
Thanks for your reply I appreciate it. Now I have been running VC for a week now and thank heavens its running flawless. Now my OS is 98SE 184Rams Compaq 5441. There have been no glitches to date with it. I scanned my hard drive with the option to "unpack" in 20 minutes complete. System resources are excellent and user friendly. As for support or info you can go to their english home page. which is
VC Home Page (http://www.viruschaser.com/Eng/index.jsp)

It explains all the features and details about VC
Thanks again in advance appreciate your help :)

[nihil]

Hi TSR,

Thanks for the link, it worked just fine. The way the product is set up for testing is that you have to download the manual as a separate exercise. I guess this is to make it 56.6 friendly?

I am sure that most of the problems I have encountered are due to some kind of contention/conflict which I will attempt to identify and resolve.

I am going to put it on an IBM PC300 booting Win98SE. That has a PIII/533 and 320Mb RAM and a 10Gb HDD. It should make an interesting comparison.

I would agree that it does not seem to cause any resource problems at all, which is important for WinMe users.

I will report back, as soon as I have more results.

BTW Some people may look at it and say "It only has 34,000 signatures in its pattern file, whilst McAfee and Norton have 70,000" Well that is true, but a lot depends on how you count them?

For example VIRUS#1a-z could be counted as anything from one to twenty-six? Also a lot of the viruses in the big boys' databases contain stuff that is so old that it probably would not run on a modern OS?

Cheers, have a good week-end

[mark_boyle2002]

I agree. Some of the Sigs that come with mcafee still include tiny etc and other boot sector and floppy transmitting virii.

Have a good weekend everyone. I'm off to the pub now.

[nihil]

Hi,

I have now been working on the original labrat/installation, (PII/266) for three hours . I am using the pattern files dated 14th November. Additional findings:

1. Even with everything else switched off it takes 1Hour 6Minutes to scan 23,619 files. And that is WITHOUT the compressed file scanning enabled! AVG took 21 minutes 28 seconds WITH compressed file scanning. Hardly anything else is running, and I have adjusted it to run at maximum priority...................It did run 11 minutes faster than in a "normal" environment.

2. I still get a black screen and scanning stops. I can restart it by hitting <enter> or moving the mouse (sometimes). I am not running a screensaver or powersaving scheme!

3. It found 2 instances of the EICAR test file (I have two more, but they are zipped, and compressed file scanning is off)

Virus Detection:

I would expect all AV products to find the EICAR test file.............so I loaded a couple of live ones:

TrojanHorse Fakesvc.C
TrojanHorse Startpage.B

It did not find either of these, although it had previously detected a .txt version of the startpage trojan as "Trojan.Startpage.57344". As I reported earlier, it did not find the executable? I have downloaded and read the manual. It appears to be configured correctly, and if it is not, I consider it to be a very dangerous product as there is no way that an inexperienced user would spot it.

AVG, running signature files dated 10th November found all four and the two compressed EICAR files.

At this point I cannot recommend paying for an AV product when you can get a free one that performs better?

I still need to test it on another machine & OS

Cheers

[TSR]

Originally posted here (http://www.AntiOnline.com/showthread.php?threadid=#post) by nihil
[B



Virus Detection:

I would expect all AV products to find the EICAR test file.............so I loaded a couple of live ones:

TrojanHorse Fakesvc.C
TrojanHorse Startpage.B

It did not find either of these, although it had previously detected a .txt version of the startpage trojan as "Trojan.Startpage.57344". As I reported earlier, it did not find the executable? I have downloaded and read the manual. It appears to be configured correctly, and if it is not, I consider it to be a very dangerous product as there is no way that an inexperienced user would spot it.



[/B]

Hi nihil
As usual I appreciate your efforst and hard work in testing this out...as I do all the members that have contributed to this post......I have sent a email with your findings back to their support to see what kind of response I will get....Also I downloaded a Trojan Simulator...Virus Chaser did not detect it in memory!....interesting to say the least...however my trojan scanner did!!! I have sent a detailed report back to them also on this matter. One point for sure....this software is for advanced users........ please keep me posted and thanks again :)

[nihil]

Hi TSR,

I had another thought. As it is produced in co-operation with Dialogue Science (it uses the DrWeb engine or an OEM version of it) I thought it might be interesting to test that?

I have just obtained a trial of DrWeb 4.3 :)

You might like to look at http://www.dials.ru/english/ which is their website.

I am beginning to think that the black screen might be something to do with the configuration of this box? as in OS/videocard/VDU combination I have a CTX 17" LCD screen and Win Me......I will look for updated drivers. I know that virus chaser "provokes" the problem, but it might have done me a favour by doing that?

AVG, SpyBot Search&Destroy, SwatIT, and AdAware 6 all run just fine and must be doing similar sorts of thing..........

I might also have comitted a criminal stupidity offence :eek: I suspect that the live ones were the result of an online attack I experienced a little while ago......I think that the thread was called "Yes I have no new antipoints, but a new virus instead"

I believe I might have sent AVG and McAfee copies of it? so I am not using a "level playing field" On the other hand, I thought that the "big boys" were all part of some information sharing club, and it DID spot the .txt version?

BTW. I still cannot get into the online help, even with the firewall switched off, so it isn't a conflict there.

A small bitch at this stage..............I cannot find a way of disabling the online scanner! that is quite important if you load a lot of software? On the other hand, this could be a way of idiot proofing it?

I should be able to run the second labrat and Dialogue Science tests today. The second labrat will also be interesting as it is an IBM PC300 with matching IBM CRT VDU. I bet the "black screen" problem goes away!

In case you were wondering..............yes, I have done AV software beta testing in the past :)


Cheers, will report back

[TSR]

Thanks nihil appreciate your hard work and testing on this product. I have just been reviewing Dr Webs site going to check it out on your advice. Will wait for your results. Aprreciate all your help in advance

[nihil]

Hi TSR,

I have now completed testing the Virus Chaser product on my first machine. I was unable to resolve it producing a "blackscreen" or to get the manual update to work. I was not very impressed with the failure to spot the two test malwares I threw at it. I also thought that it ran very slowly.

I have now installed DrWeb and run it. Installation was OK and the user interface seems much more intuitive..........I did not NEED to read the manual, which is inbuilt with this one.

It took 46 minutes to scan 23,466 files, which is still about twice that of AVG. It has about 10,000 more signatures than Virus Chaser as well. VC took 66 minutes BTW.

I had absolutely no problems with the "black screen" when running DrWeb. So it looks like something to do with the Virus Chaser GUI and my configuration

I would have one caveat: the DrWeb heuristic scanning is very aggressive :D It came up with three "false positives" And I re-checked the files with McAfee 7.0 and PC-cillin 2002. The best one was describing HijackThis.exe as "Probably WIN.Script.worm virus" It also found the Xen cleaning/tweaking utility and some other tool.

I would not give it to my granny (ie. a novice), but I am not overly worried by false positives, and always set AVs to warn and ask for instructions. It is also meant to run in conjuction with ADinf which is a checksumming type app. This would reduce the scan time by around 10X, depending on how much change has taken place, and would stop the false positives being repeated.

This brings me to another point. The smaller and more obscure AVs do tend to have a regional bias towards local malware, particularly as they tend to be reported locally first. Also, the environments they are tested on reflect local software popularity.

The "big boys" are international and tend to respond to pretty much everything, which is probably another reason for their signature files being much larger? They also have many more staff to analyse and prepare updates.

I will try DrWeb on some live targets, then move to "labrat2"

Cheers

[TSR]

Well first of all I want to thank all the members whom have contributed to this post and did a excellent job in helping me on this issue (special thanks to nihil for this time on testing and providing me with infor. I just received a email back from Virus Chaser and have found out at the present time they do not have the rights to sell in the U.S. yet. They are in the process however in getting this set up. For now one can download from their web sight (english) a evalation version and try it out. Once again thanks to all appreciate your help and input. :D

[Zero3K]

A new version of it was released earlier this year. Its now v5.0a. You can get it from http://www.viruschaser.com.hk/download/demo/VirusChaserDemo.exe.

Here's a screenshot of its new UI:

http://img206.imageshack.us/img206/1636/viruschaserss3au.png

[Black Cluster]

Man! this is a two-years old thread! Replying to it would insult the sensitives of some members here! Your post is somehow reasonable! Knowing about the updates in programs is not that hard! it still not justified to reply. Anyways, it is better than saying "It is a good program"

l would suggest not to post in a thread that has a flashing date!

Welcome to AO :)

[nihil]

Hmmm, as a matter of "style" you should open the old thread, highlight the address bar, copy it, paste it into a new thread with an appropriate title like "XYZ #2" or something, then make your post regarding the old thread.

Also add any comments you may have, particularly if you have tried the software..............in which case an idea of hardware specs and operating system would be helpful.

:)

[Zero3K]

Sorry. Are you still wanting me to make a new thread about it?

[Black Cluster]

No, as you have posted it! I don't think you need to start another post! unless you have something else to add!

[Zero3K]

Ok. Well, I do have something to say about Virus Chaser. I've been using it when it was v5.0 and thought that it had an ok UI, was easy on CPU/RAM and had a good amount of viruses it could detect (and no false postives for me). I stopped using it because its UI wasn't the best it could be. Since then, I tried other antiviruses. Just recently, I went back to its website and thought that the Korean site would have a newer version.

I then downloaded and installed it, and was happy that its UI did improve significantly. The only thing that wasn't working was the update feature. I then decided to do some searching and found that the HK site was the one that could be used as an update server. After reinstalling it from that site and following its instructions, the update service is now working (and I have an extra 2 months that I can use to update it). The only things that I would like to see added is the display of statistics for the RTM and POP3 scanner.