Updated: June 4, 2002

BitDefender for DOS Review

Courtesy of the alt.comp.virus newsgroup participants.
(These "anti-malware" pages are the result of a continuing cooperative effort.)


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We tested the DOS version of the BitDefender anti-virus program. It can be downloaded for free from http://www.bitdefender.com/html/bd_ms_dos.php. You will also find a list of system requirements there.

The following problems were encountered while trying to test it. Note that some of these problems can be circumvented and avoided, but that is obviously not the way it should be.
It certainly does not make much sense to conduct a thorough review of this product as long as these problems persist. We will be happy to publish a "regular" review once these problems have been corrected.

1. The program does not correctly evaluate command line parameters:
   
   
   
   Note that the program does list /? as a possible command line parameter if it is invoked without any parameters.
   
   
2. Another example for bad evaluation of command line parameters:
   
   
   
   Note that these 2 files, kleze.exe and klezh.exe, are located in the directory D:\virus\k. At least one other scanner, F-Prot for DOS, handles this situation correctly and scans the files.
   
   
3. The scanner crashes occasionally even before it is begins to scan:
   
   
   
   
4. There seems to be no (obvious) way to make the program stop scrolling after it has filled an entire screen when displaying the list of possible switches. The combination with the DOS command "more" does not work. As a result, the list of command line switches had to be looked up directly in the program file using a hex editor.
   
   
5. The manual update apparently went awry. Both the cumulative ZIP file and the daily ZIP file were unpacked into the plugins subdirectory. Afterwards, the program failed to detect at least two viruses which it had successfully detected before the update (Magistr.A and Magistr.B).
   At the time of testing, invoking the program with the "/info" command line switch revealed that it had around 26,000 virus signatures in its database although the web page stated there should be around 78,000.
   
   
6. The problem above may be related to a certain confusion arising from the fact that the program refers to itself as version 6.5.2 while the web site states that it's version 7. Actually, when choosing the definition files (plugins) for version 7, the signature count increases to somewhere around 57,000 but that is still far away from 78,000.