Holton & Associates embraces Command Software which includes F-Prot Professional

Holton & Associates today announced that it had secured the rights for Southern Africa of Command Software Systems with its F-Prot Professional Anti-Virus System. This product range provides the user with proactive protection against all known viruses. F-Prot Professional has a very powerful Heuristic Analysis capability that can identify unknown viruses.

Any anti-virus package, with a totally up-to-date Definition File of known viruses, will do a satisfactory job. The real test, however, is how well an Anti-Virus product will cope with new viruses that are not already identified and logged in the Definition File. Command uses its HoloCheck heuristic technology to identify the characteristics of a potential virus, worm or dodgy script. HoloCheck runs the potential virus in active memory, without allowing the virus to activate and infect the computer, and checks to see what the potential virus plans to do. This feature was put into practice with the Melissa virus, and more recently by a well known IT publication.

While many anti-virus vendors claim to provide heuristic scanning capabilities to detect previously unknown viruses, their techniques were no match for Melissa. A hundred thousand users discovered this when confronted with the Melissa virus, whilst the Heuristic capability of F-Prot identified Melissa as an unknown virus, and disallowed it to infect F-Prot users. While other anti-virus companies scrambled to provide software updates for detection, Command AntiVirus was calmly alerting users of the attack.

In January 2001, Computing UK took it upon themselves to test "unknown" virus capabilities of all the well-known AV products and found that Command was the only product to stop a new strain of the particularly nasty MTX virus/worm combination.

Command AntiVirus is regularly and independently tested by market experts and proven to offer exceptional protection. Commands AntiVirus has earned both levels of Checkmark certification, proving its ability to not only detect 100% of in-the-wild viruses, but to disinfect them as well. Command Anti-Virus was one of the first products to achieve this high level of certification. Scans are based on native file format and are not fooled by renamed files or extensions. Command AntiVirus even scans compressed files!

Additionally, and worth a mention is "Command on Demand", a product offered by Command specifically to ISPs, ASPs and Web Portals to allow users to scan their computers for viruses at any time.

Command offers regular updates can be automatically delivered and distributed on a push basis to all workstations within an enterprise system. There is also an alternative system for dial-up users to fetch and distribute updates from within the program. The Definition File updates are compact and can conveniently still fit on a floppy drive for updates to stand-alone on home computers

In a very competitive anti-virus market, Command Anti-Virus with F-Prot Professional remains one of the best AV tools of recent years. It continues to strike a good balance between its database and heuristic scanning abilities, yet retains a simple interface and maintenance structure. Command Software`s low cost pricing structure, but by no means underpowered application will excite users in South Africa.