Press Kit

1. Briefly tell me about ESET

ESET is a privately held company with headquarters in Bratislava, Slovakia, and subsidiaries in San Diego, USA, Prague, Czech Republic, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Krakow, Poland. ESET develops software solutions that deliver effective, proactive protection against evolving computer security threats. Sold worldwide in more than 160 countries, ESET's elegant, award-winning software solutions provide unparalleled threat protection and peace of mind with minimal user effort.

ESET achieved sales of over $130 million in 2008 and has an average three-year growth rate of 99%. It has an extensive worldwide distribution network with over 3,900 partners worldwide. Over 70 million users depend on ESET to secure their home or business computers.

2. Who are your customers?

ESET provides security software for home and business use, with a roughly 45/55% split over the two market segments. Our sweet spot is SMB between 250 to 2,000 seats, although we have customers with ESET software deployed on hundreds of thousands of computers.

3. What is ThreatSense.NET and how does it work?

Our unique ThreatSense.NET technology automatically collects data from our worldwide user base and immediately sends feedback on new threats trapped by our heuristics to our Threat Lab. This information is immediately incorporated into new updates as necessary–making ESET NOD32 Antivirus and ESET Smart Security more effective while dramatically reducing false positives.

The enormous amount of data retrieved by ThreatSense.NET also allows for fine tuning detection. A recent example was the Storm Worm where we developed a generic heuristic update for the worm and used ThreatSense.NET to see how many variants of the worm were detected before a new heuristic update would be required.

4. What is ThreatSense® and how does it work?

ThreatSense is ESET's award-winning scanning engine. It combines multiple layers of detection technologies to ensure new and known threats are detected with high degree of accuracy and low false positive rates.

ThreatSense uses traditional and generic signatures to detect known threats and their variants. Passive heuristics finds patterns that indicate the presence of a malicious application. For applications that use encryption or compression to hide their true intentions, active heuristics employs emulation/sandboxing technologies to run the application in an isolated environment, then intelligently weigh a variety of observed behaviors to determine whether the application in question is malicious.

These layers of detection capabilities allow ThreatSense to proactively stop variants of known threats and even new threats well before other products realize they exist.

5. What is ESET Smart Security?

ESET Smart Security is the most effective protection available to combat today's huge volumes of web- and email-borne threats. Using advanced ThreatSense® technology, ESET Smart Security delivers proactive protection against most new attacks during the critical hours when other vendors' products are not aware a new attack even exists.

ESET Smart Security is also fast. Unlike other Internet security products, it will not cause system slowdown or inconvenience users while they work.

With an advanced management console, it's easy to deploy and maintain ESET Smart Security on large networks and to tailor policies to the needs of diverse groups/classes of users. Further, with "Rip and Replace" services, displacing legacy antivirus products is a quick and automated process that can often be done without requiring a reboot.

6. Why is ESET Smart Security more effective than the competition?

ESET Smart Security uses award-winning ThreatSense technology with multiple layers of threat detection to deliver the most effective protection possible against new attacks. And ThreatSense is smart; it not only generates far fewer annoying false positive alarms than any other products that use heuristics, but finds malware other antivirus products miss. It can also do a "deep dive" into compressed archives and SSL-encrypted web and mail traffic to root out threats that other antivirus products miss.

7. What platforms does it run on?

ESET Smart Security 4 supports the following systems:

• Intel or AMD x86/x64 processors
• Microsoft Windows 2000
• Microsoft Windows XP
• Microsoft Windows Vista
• Microsoft Windows Server 2000 (Business Edition)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (Business Edition)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (Business Edition)

8. Which products does it compete against?

ESET Smart Security 4 Home Edition competes with the following products:

• Norton Internet Security
• McAfee Internet Security
• Trend Micro Internet Security
• Kaspersky Internet Security

ESET Smart Security 4 Business Edition competes with the following products:

• Symantec Endpoint Protection
• Trend Micro OfficeScan Client/Server Edition
• McAfee VirusScan Enterprise
• Sophos Endpoint Security
• Kaspersky Business Space Security

9. What is NOD32?

ESET NOD32 Antivirus is the most effective protection against today's huge volumes of Internet and email threats. It provides award-winning proactive antivirus and antispyware protection without affecting computer performance, while offering business-grade management control. Integrated SysInspector makes it easy for IT admins to diagnose and resolve problems.

Using advanced ThreatSense technology, ESET NOD32 Antivirus proactively protects against new attacks — even during the critical first hours of a malware outbreak when other vendors' products are still unaware of the attack. ESET NOD32 Antivirus detects and disables both known and unknown viruses, trojans, worms, adware, spyware, rootkits and other Internet threats.

ESET NOD32 Antivirus is also one of the fastest antivirus solutions, so fast that users won't notice it running. In fact, if it replaces a legacy antivirus program, users are likely to comment on faster-running applications.

For IT and security teams, it's easy to build group policies and manage updates. For end users, it's incredibly easy to use and highly effective, so there will be fewer help desk calls for virus outbreaks, and simpler user questions.

10. What platforms does it run on?

ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4 supports the following systems:

• Intel or AMD x86/x64 processors
• Microsoft Windows 2000
• Microsoft Windows XP
• Microsoft Windows Vista
• Microsoft Windows Server 2000 (Business Edition)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (Business Edition)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (Business Edition)

11. Which products does it compete against?

ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4 Home Edition competes with the following products:

• Norton Antivirus
• McAfee VirusScan Plus
• Trend Micro Antivirus plus AntiSpyware
• Kaspersky Antivirus

ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4 Business Edition competes with the following products:

• Symantec Endpoint Protection
• Trend Micro OfficeScan Client/Server Edition
• McAfee VirusScan Enterprise
• Sophos Endpoint Security
• Kaspersky Business Space Security

12. What differentiates ESET's version 4 products from other solutions in the market?

Key differentiation points are:

• Free support
• Faster and lighter without cutting corners and compromising security
• Self-defense to ensure integrity of ESET software and to prevent inappropriate attempts to delete or modify it
• Host-based intrusion prevention system (HIPS) uses advanced behavior analysis and network filtering to stop vulnerability exploits and infiltration attempts
• Removable device security performs additional scans of USB and CD/DVD drive when they mount, and gives the end user or administrator the ability to block access to them completely
• Integrated system tools SysInspector and SysRescue make it easy to diagnose infected systems and create bootable rescue USB thumb drive or CD/DVD to clean them
• Advanced archive scanning uncovers hidden malware, even in deeply nested compressed files. Easy-to-use settings allow the user to control maximum depth, file size, and a time out period for archive scanning

13. How does SysInspector compare to HijackThis and other tools like it?

ESET ESET SysInspector distinguishes itself from similar programs by using heuristics to automatically assign a color-coded risk assessment to each object inspected. Its intuitive graphical user interface allows the user to slice through what can be a large volume of logged data by using a slider to select the desired risk level. The user is also able to navigate through the data hierarchically, expanding and collapsing data tree as needed. In addition, ESET SysInspector can exclude private and personal information from being written to inspection logs, as well as compare two existing logs to detect differences. SysInspector also collects more detailed information about running processes than other tools. Other programs generally output a log in a flat text file format which then must be uploaded and analyzed. ESET SysInspector has that functionality built into the system. ESET SysInspector is an integral component of ESET Smart Security 4 and ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4, but is also available for free as a standalone diagnostics tool.