Pineda, Harvey Khent

Rising Antivirus
defense your computer away from all types of viruses, trojan, worm, and other malicous viruses threats in real time. RISING Antivirus protects your computers against all types of viruses, Trojans, Worms, Rootkits and other malicious programs. Easy to use, Active Defense technology, Patented Unknown Virus Scan and Clean technology and Patented Smartupdate technology make RISING Antivirus install and forget product and entitles you to focus on your own jobs with.

Rising AntiVirus Free Edition is a program from Chinese manufacturer Beijing Rising International Software Co. Ltd., which boasts a user-base of nearly 50% of China's home PC market. Unfortunately, Rising hasn't been able to make much of a dent outside of the Chinese market.

Rising Virus Lab announces a virus alarm to all cyber citizens: there is a serious vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player plug in for Internet Explorer and a Trojan that exploits this vulnerability has already been detected. Ma Jie, an expert of Rising Security, says that the old versions of Flash Active (Adobe Flash Player 9.0.115.0 and earlier versions) contain this vulnerability, and now Adobe is providing the Adobe Flash Player 9.0.124 version to protect against it. Until now, Rising has intercepted and captured several samples of Trojans aiming at this vulnerability, being the first to update the Antivirus

Library. According to the analysis made by Rising Technology Department, the recent virus sample is a Trojan Downloader. These sorts of viruses can download a variety of information from users computers, stealing popular online games accounts and equipments.

Add, Remove, Repair and Uninstall Rising Antivirus You can adjust Rising Antivirus according to your needs by adding or removing components, or reinstalling components to repair the system.

You can also uninstall Rising Antivirus when not needed. In the Windows Start menu, select Programs > Rising Antivirus > Add or Remove Components. The Rising Maintenance window will appear.

Add or Remove Features Select this to add or remove Rising Antivirus components based upon your need for more flexible and effective use of resources

Repair/Reinstall Select this to reinstall Rising Antivirus by checking the integrity of your Rising software installation and repairing problems.

Uninstall Select this to uninstall and delete all Rising Antivirus files from your computer.

Smart Active Defense Rising Antivirus' Active Defense Technology provides real-time system monitoring and protection against a wide variety of cyber threats.

It is common for virus writers to exploit system faults in operating system software to gain access to personal information or do damage to systems by capitalizing on these flaws. As a feature, Active Defense is highly customizable giving you the greatest scope for achieving the desired security level.

For the non-technical user however, there are wizards and slide bars to provide default protection at the three levels of security: "Low", "Medium" and "High". The "Defense" Tab lists all functions, an "Enable/Disable" toggle button to set each feature off and on and a button to set the defaults for each function.

Note: Windows 9X, NT and all 64-bit operating systems do not support Rising Active Defense technology.

The six functions of Rising Defense are:

System Reinforcement System Reinforcement monitors and protects OS vulnerabilities against system attacks by

malicious programs.

Application Control Application Control allows you to monitor the operational status of applications and block suspicious behavior of processes.

Malicious Behavior Interceptor Monitors programsin the system for possible malicious behaviour and allows you to authorize or reject suspicious activities.

USB/CD/DVD Monitor The USB/CD/DVD Monitor can automatically block viruses on USB media, CD/DVD and network drives.

Web Trojan Defense Web Trojan Defense automatically blocks malicious web scripts and viruses and prevents them infecting your computer.

Self Protection Self protection prevents malware from making unauthorized changes to the Rising software.

Features & Ease of Use:

The Rising Dashboard is extremely colorful - a refreshing change from the often staid and serious color schemes used by Western hemisphere antivirus manufacturers. Its feature set is divided across four tabs. The Anti-Virus tab contains basic virus scanning options (see Section 3 below for more). Defence lists the additional security measures enacted by Rising, including USB Disk Protection and Browser Protection. Tools contains advanced features, such as the Rising PC Doctor, while InfoCenter lists recent security updates.

Rising includes a number of features that other manufacturers only include in their paid versions, such as automatic scanning of USB thumb drives. It includes an optional Cloud Security feature, which uses reports of virus activity across the Rising user-base to improve virus detection. This is a user-based Cloud security, unlike Panda Cloud Free Antivirus which stores its virus signatures online in true Cloud form.

Finally, the application's Settings dialog contains sensitivity configuration options for each of the protection types, and allows users to list directories or files to exclude from scanning.

Virus Scanner Rising offers the standard three antivirus scanning options: Quick Scan, Complete Scan (called "Full Scan" by other vendors), and Custom Scan. Rising Virus Scanner

Speed: On our reference machine (see above), Rising AntiVirus scanned 32.9 MB per

second, and powered through our 1GB test file matrix in a mere 31 seconds. That's blazingly fast, and it puts Rising in the top tier of free antivirus applications in terms of speed.

Updates: Rising updates its virus definition database an average of 7.5 times per day. That's good even for commercial antivirus applications, and is excellent compared to other free options.

Performance Testing: A good antivirus program should not only prevent viruses and malware from infecting your computer but also not impact the Performance of your computer too much. We run each free antivirus program through a series of Performance Tests to see the impact it has on a standard computer. The results of our testing for Rising AntiVirus Free Edition are below:

Memory Use: Rising AntiVirus 2011 Free Edition uses 10.6 MB of system memory. #4 rated of the 12 antivirus programs we tested.

Reboot Time: Rising added 16.2 seconds to our test computer's reboot time. #5 rated program we tested this year.

Installation Size: Rising AntiVirus Free Edition requires 358 MB of hard-drive space for installation. #11 rated program we tested.

 Initial Scan Speed: Rising scans files the first time at a speed of 32.9 MB/s. #5 rated program we tested.

Subsequent Scan Speed: Rising performs subsequent scans at a speed of 40.3 MB/s. #6 rated program we tested.

Initial Application Launch: Rising AntiVirus 2011 Free Edition added 0.132s to launch a web browser for the first time after a reboot. #2 rated program we tested.

Subsequent Application Launch: Rising added 0.024s on average for subsequent web browser launches. This was the #2 rated program we tested.

File Conversion Time: Rising added 0.46s on average to convert a MP3 file to four other file types. #9 rated program we tested.

System Impact Score: The "System Impact Score" is a comparative score tallied from the above 8 Antivirus tests. Rising AntiVirus Free Edition scored a total of 60 out of 96 points when compared to the other antivirus programs tested. This ranked Rising as the #3 rated (tied) free antivirus program we tested this year - tied with Avast! Free Antivirus, and just behind ClamWin and Avira Antivir Personal.

Effectiveness: The most important function of an antivirus program is to keep your computer free from Viruses and other Malware. Below we'll take a look at some of the industry's top Virus/Malware Detection testing and certification.

a) AV Comparatives is an independent antivirus testing lab in Austria providing some of the most trusted virus detection tests in the industry. AV-Comparatives hasn't included Rising's security software in its recent testing, but back in February 2007 (which is a long time in the security world), Rising was included in AV-Comparatives group test of programs not included in its regular testing due to not being able to "fulfill some requirements (e.g. detecting at least 85% of the normal full test-set)." Even in this test Rising performed poorly - detecting only 78% of Viruses, and 69% of Trojans. This ranked Rising 4th overall in the test - behind relatively unknown names such as VBA32, ArcaVir, and Ikarus.

b) ICSA Labs has NOT Certified Rising's AntiVirus software. ICSA is an independent organization that sets standards for security products and certifies anti-virus software.

c) Virus Bulletin - Rising FAILED VB's most recent testing in December 2010 with 2523 misses in its malware detection (not good!). Rising also failed the previous test in August 2010. The VB 100% award is given to antivirus software that detects all viruses "in the wild", which Rising isn't apparently good at doing.

d) West Coast Labs' Checkmark Anti-Virus Desktop Certification. WCL specializes in functionality testing, performance validation and Checkmark Certification of security products.

Effectiveness Summary: Rising has not been included in any major tests in recent years (ie. AV-Test.org or AV-Comparatives.org), and not being able to even pass Virus Bulletin's testing, which should be a fairly easy test for a good antivirus program, proves that Rising has a long ways to go before it's a top-notch antivirus program.

Help & Support:

On-Screen Help: Too many of Rising's features don't contain adequate on-screen explanations of their functions. The English text included in the program, while not atrocious, often contains run-on sentences and awkward sentence structure.

Local Help: No local help file; all help is online.

Online Help: The online help manual presented when you click Help underneath the arrow in the upper-right corner is displayed in a hard-to-read fixed-space font. Most of the advice offered is both poorly written and unhelpful (such as "please keep network smoothly during upgrading"). The online support center offers no user forum like many other vendors, but it does sport an extensive knowledge base as well as the ability to log customer support tickets.

CONCLUSION:

Rising AntiVirus 2011 Free Edition has a great suite of free features and very good performance results in our testing, but these are offset by its clumsy installation process and poor help text. Even more disturbing is Rising's inability to pass a major virus detection test (such as AV-Comparatives.org). This forces us to shy away from Rising's yet unproven antivirus technology. One would do better reading our other free antivirus reviews for a more effective alternative.