Out of this world AV
No matter if it’s a utility or a game, I’m always on the look out for software that is free and reliable. Rollie Hawk pointed me to a new antivirus program that has become a staple on my home PC’s. The program is called Moon Secure AV.
Moon Secure AV, in a nutshell, is ClamAV with a user friendly GUI. The GUI isn’t pretty like more mature AV’s like AVG and Norton. Think along the lines of the nerdy girl in school versus the prom queen. It’s not the prettiest but it gets the job done. Screenshots can be found here.
Here are the things that I like about MSAV:
- Real-time scanning and automatic updates are enabled by default.
- No reboot required after installation.
- Resource usage, compared to other AV programs, is relatively low
- Less than 30MB of memory.
- Low CPU utilization during real-time protection. It does go up during active scans.
What didn’t I like?
- Windows XP and Vista support only. Windows 2000 support would be nice because I know quite a few businesses, as well as home users, that still use 2K Professional on their workstations.
- There isn’t a setting to exclude directories from being scanned. This is going to be implemented later according to the developers.
- Scanning is slow. The ClamAV engine isn’t known for it’s speed.
I recommend MSAV and look forward to seeing it develop, just like the nerdy girl from high school.
Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success. – Henry Ford
21.Nov.07 
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4 Responses to “Out of this world AV”
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I see you were a “quick adopter” just as I was!
Those of us that have really struggled with antivirus software can see the value in this one really quickly, I guess.
It was a pleasant surprise when I found MSAV. At the time, I was to the point that I was working on using a Cygwin/ClamAV combo just to get something useful.
Where did you see that Windows 2000 isn’t supported? I’m using version 2 and can’t find anything that says that. I can verify that at the very least it does *work* on Win2k, even if it isn’t supported.
You are definitely right on with the directory exclusion issue. For most people this isn’t a big deal, but when we are talking databases like SQL, Exchange, and so on, scanning can cause all sorts of chaos. I haven’t tried this yet, but I’m thinking a workaround might be to have the MSAV service(s) run as MSAV_USER (just a made up on-machine account) and then block user’s read permissions in that directory.
As to the slow scanning, yeah very slow. ClamWin is too and as you said ClamAV isn’t known for speed. I can say this, though: while it’s slow, it doesn’t kill your machine while scanning. You can tell that ClamAV was developed for server environments in that sense, I suppose.
In spite of the slow scanning, I do like that in version 2 (not sure about prior versions) you have the “quick scan,” etc. options available kind of like the commercial AVs. That at least checks a lot of the main executables on your machine and really doesn’t take terribly long.
One reason that I still run ClamWin as a supplement (and it really says something about MSAV and ClamWin that they CAN be run together… imagince trying to run Mcafee and Symantec on the same machine and the impact that would have) is that in recent versions it has a “memory scan” that scans all the running services and applications for viruses. I just leave that bad boy in the system tray for that purpose.
One other feature that’s missing but should be included shortly is a built-in scheduler. You can still schedule the command line version in Windows, but that’s a standard AV feature that will get more people using it I’m sure.
By the way, that last line of your review is pure gold!
I forgot one other thing I was going to say.
Something I eventually want to try with this (and wanted to with ClamWin) is to try a custom build for branding purposes. I’ll bet a lot of businesses would love to have their “own” AV with their own logo, etc.
I’ve been using this for a while and I noticed a couple of things.
1)Whenever you ask it to scan a file it needs to connect to the interwebs.
2) Windows does not detect it as an anti-virus program.
The first one I like very much. The second one needs improvement me thinks.
Where did you see that Windows 2000 isn’t supported?
On the FAQ page, they only list that it will run on XP and Vista. I didn’t try it on a 2K machine. Good to know that it works.
(Yeah, I know. Late reply. Sue me.
)