Bleeding Edge is increasingly sceptical about the constant exaggeration of security threats by the industry, but we still believe that it’s important to have a good firewall, anti-virus and spyware protection.

A few years ago, malware was largely written by misguided – and very bad-mannered - hackers looking for bragging rights. These days it’s increasingly motivated by greed. The research firm IDC estimates that the black market for procuring fraudulent identities alone is worth close to $US1 billion a year. With that sort of money at stake, today’s malware is extremely sophisticated, and increasingly difficult to detect.

We don’t believe, however, that the bloated suites offered by some of the biggest brands necessarily provide the best protection. Single-purpose applications, many of them free, could be at least as good.

Too many people, in our opinion, remain with the same security vendors, simply because of the convenience of renewing the annual subscription. The performance of these products can be dramatically affected by the rapidly-changing nature of viruses, Trojans and spyware.

We’ve tried many over the years. We quickly became impatient with the bloat and various problems caused by Norton Anti-Virus – so impatient that we are reluctant even to try their latest version, Norton 360 – then switched between programs like F-Prot, the Melbourne-developed Vet and Kaspersky Anti-Virus. We’ve also flirted with free software, including AVG, Avast, and ClamAV.

Over the past year or so, we’ve become increasingly impressed with NOD32, developed by the Slovak company, ESET.

It’s fast, reliable, and largely unobtrusive. Every hour it checks for updates, which it downloads in the background without any fuss. Because we have our email virus scanned at the server by the specialist email service FastMail (fastmail.fm), we’re well protected against most virus threats. We’re more concerned about new viruses whose signatures haven’t been picked up and programmed into virus scanners. That’s one of the reasons NOD32 appeals to us.

In addition to using signatures to identify malware, it “ThreatSense” engine looks for virus-like activity that helps it identify new threats. The Shadowserver Foundation – a volunteer group of security professionals that gathers, tracks and reports on threats, keeps statistics on so-called “zero day” threats, testing theability of major anti-virus programs to pick up previously unknown malware.

At Shadowserver.org, the latest statistics show NOD32 heading the current list, with a 99.09 per cent success rate. If you’re looking for a free anti-virus tool, the performance of Avira’s AntiVir is also quite impressive, at 97.67 per cent. It’s available at free-av.com.

NOD32 also performs well against rootkits, which mask their presence once installed on the system.

You interface with NOD32 through its Control Centre, which you access either by clicking the TaskBar icon or launching from the Start menu (All Programs/ESet/Control Centre). NOD32 is highly configurable, which endears it to more experienced users, but it has a good Help section for novices, at the bottom of the Control Centre. It provides good details on the various “threat protection modules” that you can choose to enable.

One of the first things to check is that the program is set up for automatic updating. You find that option under the Update menu. It will tell you when the last update was completed. The Scheduler/Planner selection under NOD32 System Tools allows you to automate scans.

NOD32 will run faster if you clear temporary files from your computer. You can do that with the freeware CCleaner from ccleaner.com. One thing to remember with CCleaner is that it will also clean out things like cookies, and histories and recent documents by default, so check which files have been ticked before you choose “Run Cleaner”.

On the local ESET distributor’s site you’ll pay $64.50 for NOD32, which seems a touch steep given it’s available on the eset.com home page for $US39 ($A47.30). The local price does, however, include GST.

To get the best performance from any new anti-virus program, you should fully uninstall and remove your previous scanner before installing the new product. Norton products can be more difficult than most to erase. You might have to run the Norton removal tool.

Removing NOD32 is much easier … as you’d expect from a well-mannered program.