Is this still the best malware scanner Emsisoft or has things changed ?
- Thread starter ng4ever
- Start date
Please provide comments and solutions that are helpful to the author of this topic.
Are you looking for a second opinion scanner or something to provide primary protection?
I’d say Emsisoft is still every bit as good as it used to be for either role. Quite honestly, the BitDefender engine has been through some uncertain times the last year or so. For a while they were really lagging in zero-day detection, and Emsisoft would use their in-house engine to pick up the slack. However, lately, I’ve been noticing BD has once again become one of the first few engines that picks up on new Emotet/AgentTesla variants so maybe that’s getting better again. Either way, IMO it never got so bad to the point that I wouldn’t recommend BD.
I’d say Emsisoft is still every bit as good as it used to be for either role. Quite honestly, the BitDefender engine has been through some uncertain times the last year or so. For a while they were really lagging in zero-day detection, and Emsisoft would use their in-house engine to pick up the slack. However, lately, I’ve been noticing BD has once again become one of the first few engines that picks up on new Emotet/AgentTesla variants so maybe that’s getting better again. Either way, IMO it never got so bad to the point that I wouldn’t recommend BD.
Primary protection mainly.
Emsisoft is still a good choice but honestly there’s a lot of great choices now. F-Secure, BitDefender, Norton360, Kaspersky all have fairly similar approaches to AV protection and are arguably more widely tested so you might have more data points to go with.
I think Emsisoft’s developers being so passionate about privacy and their cloud based management console are their two most compelling differentiating features, but it’s worth cross shopping.
P.S. I’m relatively new here so I don’t know how long you’ve been gone, but at least since 2019, Windows Defender has gotten so good that it’s honestly becoming more and more difficult to justify why pay for a third party solution....
I think Emsisoft’s developers being so passionate about privacy and their cloud based management console are their two most compelling differentiating features, but it’s worth cross shopping.
P.S. I’m relatively new here so I don’t know how long you’ve been gone, but at least since 2019, Windows Defender has gotten so good that it’s honestly becoming more and more difficult to justify why pay for a third party solution....
- Jan 17, 2019
- 70
Well that depends. If you're talking about their Emergency Kit free scanner, it's still among the best, alongside with Malwarebytes Free and HitmanPro.
As for their paid real time protection, Emsisoft Anti-Malware, it's still one of the best product on the market. It's light, powerful enough, and respects your privacy.
It kind of feel like the hype for Emsisoft from a few years ago is gone, but I think that's simply because they're well established now and they haven't released any major update in a while. Also, as @MacDefender said, there's a lot of very good security softwares out there.
As for their paid real time protection, Emsisoft Anti-Malware, it's still one of the best product on the market. It's light, powerful enough, and respects your privacy.
It kind of feel like the hype for Emsisoft from a few years ago is gone, but I think that's simply because they're well established now and they haven't released any major update in a while. Also, as @MacDefender said, there's a lot of very good security softwares out there.
Bonorex
Level 1
- Jun 12, 2020
- 39
I don't know if it's the best, but I find Emsisoft's Emergency Kit free scanner to be an excellent second opinion scanner for three reasons: it's a portable solution (and it therefore doesn't load additional services at startup, if you save it on your PC), it uses a second engine specialized for detecting adware and it's relatively fast at scanning. Since Emsisoft uses Bitdefender's definitions, I like to complement them with ESET's . ESET's free scanning tool (Online scanner) is also an amazing product, very light and quite fast at scanning. You must also consider that Bitdefender (Emsisoft) and Eset are among the antiviruses with the lowest number of False Positives, so their scan results should be pretty much reliable.
- Feb 25, 2017
- 2,639
One of the Best Anti-Malware products I'd say but the best 2nd opinion scanner is Hitman.Pro in my opinion
- Sep 5, 2017
- 1,195
i remember you were loyal customer of kaspersky solution. Did you change your security policy
??
i remember you were loyal customer of kaspersky solution. Did you change your security policy
Not too much. Kaspersky still tends to be objectively one of my favorites in terms of how well it performs. Actually my primary machine is still running KTS2021.
I still like to give credit where credit is due -- for those who haven't been paying attention to the industry in the past 2-3 years, back then Windows Defender was clearly a second-rate product with some good ideas. Nowadays, it really does perform well enough that the average user should really stop and ask if they need a third party AV, as opposed to the old school knee-jerk reaction to always replace WD with something else.
- Sep 5, 2017
- 1,195
yes i agree with that. in the past couple of years ,Microsoft bought a lot of good startup which most of them was specialized in machine learning for AV solutions and integrated their expertise in its windows defender so their protection is enhanced a lot.their protection became much harder to evade and their protection is improved especially for their endpoint protection.if i see that their protection is enough to depend on for their built in solution and i may give up third party AV solution soon if there resource utilization and RAM consumption is improved."My principle is less software>>less conflict ,vulnerabilities and miss-configuration>>less surface attack better overall protection.
when i dig deeper in CS filed i realized that protection is depend on user awareness first then protection software as incident response.also multi-layer tools with different protection approaches without bloating OS with a lot of software is much better than depending on all in one package as your defense.
for example , simple hardware firewall with some policies and some security policies besides windows defender+reliable backup may be enough.if you could have some data logging solution and have time to check some events logged would be powerful approach.it is balance between operation and security.
Last edited:
Similar threads
