Zilya Antivirus

[Belatucadrus]

Having posted the thread on AntiVirus Freebies I've started to check out one of the lesser known products on the list Zilya a Ukranian product Zilya operate out of Kiev offering a no frills anti virus freebie for home users.

Pros:- Fairly light on resources, regular automated updates for signatures and software, can set a scheduled scan, checks e-mail, has heuristic real time protection. Not encumbered with firewall or additional suite stylee gubbins.

Cons:- Too many false positives, so far it’s tagged a copy of Cpuz.exe, a video driver backup and an Access installation executable I created as having Trojans, they don't. It’s also a bit of a bugger to get it to ignore them. Awards listed are fairly meaningless, no certification from ICSA or Virus Bulletin.

I’ll keep it on the laptop for a few months and let you know how I feel about it then.

[Belatucadrus]

Well after a couple of weeks here are a few additional thoughts.

Still a neat application that doesn't hog resources, schedule scan works, e-mails are checked & certified and signature updates are checked for every three hours and installed if necessary. They also seem to be issued pretty frequently as you'd expect these days.

Testing it with eicar and it worked fine.

It still reports some false positives though they do try and fix these when the program updates are released. Software updates are scanned for once a day.

I'll have to qualify my comment about it being a bugger to get Zillya to ignore these false positives. It's a bugger if you do it the way I did, do it properly and it's quite easy. All part of the learning curve.

Still no independent certification from anybody whose opinion I value vis a vis security software, so caveat emptor.

[Boris]

I might try it on my TESTBOX if I have chance later on - sounds like it might be OK ?

[Belatucadrus]

Operationally it's OK, there are flaws as I've said with the false positives. Other than that my only real reason for not recommending it is that beyond the eicar test file I've got no way of telling how effective it is and recommendations from a few of the lesser download sites really doesn't compare with VirusBulletin or ICSA test certification.

The only one on the list I have real reservations about is EAV The free software is hosted by Brothersoft and a couple of other sites and if you look for it there are a few people willing to give somewhat qualified praise as to its efficacy. But I have my concerns the program is created by Your-soft and they seem to have attracted a fair bit of negative input from WOT users. They’re also responsible for a truly shambolic and amateurish in a bad way website. I doubt anybody in their right mind would pay for their commercial products.

[Belatucadrus]

Zillya conclusions

After two months running on my laptop I’ll admit to quite liking it. After the initial issues with the false positive which I told it to ignore it’s been entirely acceptable. It’s just pootled away anonymously in the background doing what it’s supposed to. It’s stable, not resource hungry has a virus database comparable in number of entries with the better known names and sufficient features to do the job adequately.

But as I mentioned before I’m not in possession of any malware and the only test file I have access to is Eicar which to be fair it detected quickly and stopped in its tracks. But there are still no tests or certifications from any of the recognised independent authorities, just awards from download sites and not even the best ones. So I’ll say nice and I’d be happy to use it myself were I not about to test out one of the other new freebies.

BUT I’ll hold fire on recommending it to anybody else until it’s been subjected to some more rigorous testing by experts with something harder to dispose of than a harmless test file.

[Belatucadrus]

Sods law dictates that just as I post a conclusion bemoaning the lack of independent testing on Zillya I go and find one , it's listed on a PDF of a group test run by PCSecurityLabs. Unfortunately for Zillya the detection rates are pretty lousy, may be why there's no mention of it on their website.

I'll revise my conclusion to "Interesting but not good enough yet." may be worth another look in a few months time.

[Belatucadrus]

Zillya now gets a Bronze award at OPSWAT not top line certification, but nice to see some independent verification at last.

[Belatucadrus]

Free version discontinued.