Speaking at a press event in Bratislava yesterday ESET’s chief technology officer Palo Luka announced some of the new encryption features that have been added as part of the company’s Version 10 release of its consumer security software, which launched last month.
“Version 10 was probably the smoothest and best release so far,” Luka claimed. “The features are pretty remarkable,” and are detailed below:
Script-based Attack Protection
Detects attacks by malicious scripts that try to exploit Windows Power Shell. Also detects malicious JavaScripts that can attack via your browser, with Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge browsers all supported.
Luka explained that this new protection is especially useful in defending against “the worst kind of malware that you can get these days when you are a home user or a consumer”, which is ransomware.
Protection Against Ransomware
This adds another layer of protection against especially nasty types of malware. This layer is tracking processes and activity, thus alerting the user if a suspicious behavior is taking place.
Home Network Protection
This addition allows users to prepare for IoT threats in the home, enabling them to test their home router for vulnerabilities. What’s more, it also provides an easy-to-access list of connected devices.
“Often we don’t even know what’s connected to our networks,” Luka said, “so we figured it might be really useful to provide people with some sort of audit of what’s in their network.”
Web Cam Protection
Constantly monitors all the processes and applications running on a user’s computer to see which ones want to use the webcam – alerting the user to any that try to access the web cam unexpectedly and lets them block them.
ESET Password Manager
Employs AES-256 encryption – the world’s leading standard, as used by the military – to store and pre-fill all passwords with the use of a master password. It can also generate and store extra-strong new passwords each time the user needs one.
“People don’t use good passwords,” argued Luka. “We kept telling people which types of passwords they should use” but they still seem to use insecure credentials online. “This will help you [users] remember and generate very complicated passwords which are different for each site.”
ESET Secure Data
Lastly, this lets the user encrypt files and removable media (e.g. USB keys) for ultra-secure safeguarding of their data, protecting against data theft in the event of USB-key or laptop loss, and allows secure collaboration and data sharing.