Review: Eset Smart Security Home Edition security software

Many companies are trying to combat the threats posed by viruses and spyware, but one you may not have encountered is Slovakian company Eset.

Eset Smart Security combines the conventional virus database – where the company writes specific fixes for known viruses – with a more advanced analysis called Threatsense that protects against new virus outbreaks. The most striking part of Eset Smart Security is the simplicity of its design. Whether this is a good or bad feature will depend on how involved you like to get with your security software's controls.

The basics are all on display so it's easy to independently turn the anti-virus and anti-spyware, firewall and anti-spam modules on and off, and there are facilities to add names to the spam blacklist and the list of trusted correspondents, but other than this, most things happen automatically.

The user can also turn on advanced controls that give a tree-based outline of all the possible settings, so it's possible to select the bit in which you’re interested. While this is an interesting alternative approach to the process of changing settings, it’s more awkward to navigate than a regular control screen with lots of buttons.

Anti-spyware protection is becoming more important than anti-virus, as spyware has the potential to steal confidential data and to be more financially damaging. Under test, Smart Security took 34 minutes to complete a virus and spyware scan of just over 500,000 files, which is quick by today's standards. The scan turned up one piece of malware, which was efficiently cleaned.

During the scan we continued to run the test PC using regular applications and noticed little slowdown in performance – better than with some of Eset’s competition. The program uses a scoring mechanism for spam, based on bad emails it knows about and on the blacklist to which you can add problem messages.

In recent testing by independent virus researchers AV-Comparatives the virus scanner used in Smart Security was rated second overall in new threat detection and was the only product to generate no false alarms. It’s crucial to find a product that pesters you only when there’s important information to relay, and Smart Security scores well on this.