Since last 3 to 4 days we have come across lots of cases of reported infection of W32.Xpag virus and surprisingly found Net Protector Antivrus (NPAV) installed on the computers of all those cases. We were surprised to see the connection and was just thinking of what is the connection between this malware and that dubious NPAV.
When today I came across a news in a local (regional language) newspaper Lokmat which had title of “AntiVirusach banla virus chi shikar” means – AntiVirus gets infected by Virus. This news talks about how from last four days all the customers of NPAV are facing problem of a new virus infection which the antivirus is not able to detect or remove properly. (Link to full news article in Lokmat)
For all those who may not be aware, NPAV is a dubious product. Being competitor we had been observing this product since its origin and had observed lot of abnormalities in the product. In its early days we had seen NPAV used McAfee command line (DOS based) scan engine being used for detections of viruses. When contacted with McAfee they had denied any business relations with NetProtector people, still clearly the team behind NPAV was boldly using the free DOS based McAfee scanner inside their commercial NPAV scanner illegitimately and selling the product commercially in the market. When NPAV saw that McAfee has office in India and they can legally put him in trouble they switched their engine from McAfee to BitDiffiender again in illicit way. They had started using BitDiffender scan engine without having any business relations with BitDiffender and also started to work on their own engine by hiring few software engineers.
One cannot develop an antivirus product without having any background of years of research & development in virus analysis or by either adopting virus scan engine from third party commercial antivirus vendor. In case of NPAV both the approaches are missing. They do not have any credible experienced research team and they are using pirated scan engine of some third party vendor and hence cannot guarantee timely updates for any new malware outbreak.
Users using NPAV are thus unknowingly becoming part of the fraudulent practice of using pirated software (in spite of paying for the AntiVirus service) and at the same time remain in the false believe of having being protected from viruses.
All this has been exposed with recent outbreak of W32.Xpag which is a very sophisticated polymorphic virus that needs experts help to detect and clean from the systems which NPAV team clearly lacks because of obvious reasons.
Our recommendation is use genuine Windows and genuine antivirus software – after all its your data and business that is at stake.
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Hello,
Its good that you pointed out this thing but why should someone use your antivirus software as well as microsoft provides its own Microsoft Security Essentials – Antivirus Software Package Bundled free for Lifetime with its Windows 7 operating System.
So Its evident that someone should not buy an antivirus package like yours which is very very costly.