ZenOK Free Antivirus Professional 2012 review

Only 3 months have passed from this year– 2011 and 2012 versions of some software starts to appear.  ZenOK Antivirus Protection Professional 2012, is intended to be a complete and professional protection for your computer and data(very important !). If we consider the existing two different approaches of the defense, the active defense consisting of installing a good antivirus with antispyware and firewall module and the passive defense consisting of  a secured backup of your most important files or data, then ZenOK Antivirus covers both.

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However, if the antivirus is free, the backup feature(storage and service) of ZenOK antivirus  has a price:

– 5GB + Increased Security is 4.99 USD/1 year or 4.00/year for 3 years purchase;

– 150 GB + Increased Security costs 34 USD/year and 29.67/year for 3 years purchase;

Files are encrypted with a strong encryption algorithm — 256-bit AES before to be transferred to the backup servers in a SSL encrypted session. The servers spread around the globe in data centers from U.S., Italy, Hong Kong, U.K. assure a good connection speed from everywhere worldwide.

Another feature of ZenOK Antivirus is Data Loss Protection service which comes with a guarantee up to 100,000 USD for home and business users. There is a calculator on the ZenOK website where you can estimate your data value based either on your salary???, your self estimation or file type of stored data.Depending of value of your data, a Data Loss Coverage is calculated and the fee you have to pay. For example if Data Loss Coverage is 10,000 USD then the fee is 34 USD/year and for 50,000 USD the fee is 560 USD/year.

If you opt for this plan — Data Loss Protection service, you also benefit by Data Recovery Service and Data Loss Risk Management and Warnings features. Data Recovery Service claims  to recover the lost data one time for one hard disk in a Class 100 Data Recovery Cleanroom environment, that’s mean a laboratory with almost without any dust particles, if required you will be asked to pack the broken hard disk and send it to a laboratory indicated by ZenOK and they will support the shipping and recovery costs.

Data Loss Risk Management and Warnings is a kind of system parameters monitor, warning you when it identify a risk of hard disk failure and therefore you have enough time to back up your important data before being too late. As examples of monitored parameters are: hard disk temperature, hard disk usage intensity, operating system errors, known security vulnerabilities, CPU and RAM memory errors and so on.

In order to receive hourly updates for ZenOK Free Antivirus, you need to register the product, only a valid email adress is required.

It’s interesting to mention a function built in ZenOK Antivirus, is called Dynamic Risk Management Service. When you agree the License Agreement, you agree also that a lot of informations about your computer, your network and even individual identifiers or contact informations(they say unintentionally!) other than globally unique identifier(GUID) will be sent to their servers. Your name, address, or phone number can be sent unintentionally. Basic informations about how you use your programs, your computer and connected devices, their settings and many more, better I will put here an excerpt from their License Agreement:

Dynamic Risk Management Detection reports generally include information about Configuration, such as how many processors are in Your computer, what is the temperature of Your hard drive, how many network connections You use, the operating system that Your computer is currently running, screen resolutions for display devices, the strength of the signal between Your computer and network, and if high-speed USB connections are turned on. Performance and reliability, such as how quickly a program responds when You click a button, how many problems You experience with a program or a device, and how quickly information is sent or received over a network connection. Program use, such as the features that You use the most often, how frequently You launch programs, and how many folders You typically create on Your desktop. File properties, such as the name of the file, extension of the file, date of creation, date of change of the file, if the file was a virus, if the file was backed-up. You acknowledge that ZenOK collects and sends to ZenOK certain information regarding the users of the Software, including certain personally identifiable information as well as certain information from the user’s computer, including (i) certain information about Your computer software and hardware such as Your IP address, operating system, Web browser software and version, (ii) data concerning potential malware threats to Your computer and the target(s) of those threats, including the file names, cryptographic hash, vendor, size, date stamps, information about Your computer’s system checkpoints, which may include path, file and application names, (iii) copies applications or programs that are deemed malicious as well as information concerning the behaviors they manifested to be detected as malicious and application settings and configurations, such as associated registry keys, and (iv) information about applications that were wrongfully classified as malicious, meaning that they were allowed to run by the user after detection. ZenOK uses Dynamic Risk Management Detection information to improve our software and risk calculation algorithms. We may share Dynamic Risk Management Detection information with partners, but the information cannot be used to identify You. Information that is collected by or is sent to ZenOK, may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country in which ZenOK or its affiliates, subsidiaries, or agents maintain facilities.

It seems to collect and send pretty much informations, too many for my taste.

ZenOK Antivirus is based on reputed Bitdefender engine, theoretically creating premises for excellent performances but I was disappointed at this point. The Bitdefender engine used for ZenOK antivirus is rather an old version (2008-2009 years) and the scanning speed is very, very slow.

Although the creators of this antivirus sustains they removed the unnecessary buttons from their software interface for the sake of simplicity, I perceive this as a disadvantage. The only option available is to perform a full system scan, you can choose to scan individual files, folders or drives only via the right-click menu. The real time protection is missing entirely, it is available only on demand scanning in order to find some virus trojans in your computer but even so the results are strange. I’ve tested ZenOK Antivirus with a few well-known RAT(Remote Administration Tool) trojans and in some cases the antivirus recognizes a certain trojan as a threat but does not delete it, even it let me run it in my computer. The list with detected threats shows only for Status “Could…canned”  whatever mean this and for Threat Name, “File Locked” so it does not know the name despite the fact this trojan used for testing is well-known and almost all antivirus software available can recognize it easy.

In other case another trojan was recognized and deleted, but remember, all of this when I chose explicitly from the context menu(right-click) menu to run a scan over the trojan file, otherwise there is not a continuous monitoring of open files and folders like in other antivirus software — so, no real-time protection.

With other words, you can double-click to run a virus and infect yourself ZenOK Antivirus will not stop you. Bad.

I assume the team of coders behind this software has only good intentions but it has also a lot of work to do to improve their product up to nowadays standards required for an antivirus. Otherwise, it is a promising software.

If I’m allowed, I would suggest to ZenOK Antivirus creators a better implementation of the Bitdefender engine because as it is now their product does not deserve the name “Professional”,  and a more understandable layout and presentations in their website, as it is now is quite hard to figure out in a reasonable time chunk what is their products about. The whole website is floating around the 100,000 USD guarantee but that can be easily taken as only a marketing strategy.

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Keep safe !

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