Eset Aims for Mobile Protection Against Digital Threats

Popularity – the elusive Holy Grail sought by many a geek during the school years. In that social setting, you paid a price for not being popular. The irony is that in today's technology setting the reverse is true: being popular often paints a target on your back – just ask Microsoft and the thousands of customers who have to update their Windows security settings every month.

The miscreants who develop computer viruses and other malware follow the popular crowd. They go where the action is and, according to Eset, a leader in proactive digital threat protection, the action is in mobile devices, which is why the company has announced a free beta version of Eset Mobile Antivirus.

The time is right for mobile antivirus. At least, that's what Dan Clark, vice president of marketing at Eset thinks. "It has to do with the number of phones in the market – 35 million of them shipped in the fourth quarter of 2007, which is up 72 percent from the same time period in 2006," he said.

Clark claims the market for smartphones is close to150 million. "It's increased to the point that malware developers will target Smartphones more heavily to generate financial gain," he said. "Attacks follow volume, and we wanted to get our product out a bit before it's really needed."

The Eset products designed for computer desktops are known for having very little impact on system performance, and Clark says this holds true with Eset Mobile Antivirus. "The mobile product uses a very small client and has minimal memory, minimal bandwidth and minimal CPU requirements," said Clark. "It's been optimized especially for the mobile phone platform."

The Eset Mobile Antivirus features include:

• Heuristic Threat Detection – Based on ESET’s heuristic engine, ThreatSense, which identifies threats based on their behavior.
• On-demand Scanning – Scans and cleans both integrated and removable memory media (i.e., smart cards), performs a full memory/running processes scan; specific folder scanning capability with results displayed on screen.
• Advanced On-access Scanning – Scans created/used files. Scans incoming files via wireless connections (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Infrared).
• Activity Log – Stores scan statistics and database status in a user-friendly format. Includes scan results-history.
• Variable In-depth Scanning of Cab Files – Lets you set cab file scanning to the level you want.
• Automatic/On-demand Updates – Providesup-to-date protection against all threat types. Schedule updates on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
• Intuitive User Interface – Easy-to-set dialogs and intuitive menu.
• Compact Updates – ESET’s update files consume less bandwidth to the mobile device.

ESET Mobile Antivirus currently supports PDAs and smartphones running Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 and Windows Mobile 6.

If you're interested in testing the beta software for free, you can download it here. The company said it expects the final version of the software to be generally available later this year.

Lauren Simonds is the managing editor of SmallBusinessComputing.com