Earlier this year I reported on three new products from CA. These products were EZ Antivirus, Anti-Spam 2005 and eTrust PestPatrol 2005 and together they formed the company’s three-pronged eTrust protection service. CA has now combined these three standalone protection solutions into its eTrust Internet Security Suite and has included an eTrust Personal Firewall protection for good measure.

Installation of this suite is relatively straightforward although I would suggest you set aside a reasonable chunk of time as the procedure is hardly the quickest exercise. At the conclusion of the installation you will need to reboot your system and an automatic wizard will then offer to lead you through the process of setting up rules for how the firewall element of the suite handles popular applications. As you expect, the various components of this suite have a similar style of interface that shows some thought has gone into the development of the suite.

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CA Antivirus protection, like the other modules, can be accessed from its System Tray icon. You can carry out an immediate scan of your computer; set up a schedule for future scans; select specific items for scanning; and configure settings including any files to be excluded from future scans. Tools are available for quarantining suspect files plus the creation of reports for submitting to the eTrust antivirus technical support team. Regular updates can be scheduled by the user on a date and time basis.

The PestPatrol element of the suite aims to combat the threat of Spyware. According to the latest download information from CA, PestPatrol is capable of currently dealing with over 125,000 items of Spyware. The software can scan computers for threats and provide a link to a database of pests for more information. As well as operating on-demand, PestPatrol can provide real-time protection and deal with threats attempting to infiltrate the computer. A range of configuration options, including the creation of a White List of items to be ignored and the sending of scan results to the PestPatrol research team, are available.

Whether it is unsolicited emails for increasing body part sizes or the more insidious threats knows as phishing, our mail-boxes are constantly being bombarded by unscrupulous third-parties. CA’s solution is eTrust Anti-Spam. The software automatically integrates itself into your email client in its role of guardian against unwanted drivel delivered via POP3 and MAPI accounts. It monitors incoming messages and uses industry-standard authentication methods to check that the email is from the indicated sender.

Suspect mail is placed in a quarantine folder allowing the user to decide whether it should be kept and added to the list of accepted recipients or placed on a list of unwanted sources. The software has the ability to handle numerous accounts and can deal with messages in various languages. As part of its basic function, it creates an index of all messages to help when searching for specific items.

Completing this suite is the eTrust Personal Firewall. As mentioned earlier, a wizard will help ease your path through setting up this feature with advice as to which programs are safe or dangerous. A stealth mode can make your computer invisible to hackers; pop-ads can be blocked; suspicious attachments placed in quarantine; and alerts will give recommendations regarding programs attempting to connect to the Internet or communicating with your system.

eTrust Internet Security Suite is currently available online and will cost £39.95 for a single user. This price includes a one-year subscription to free daily signature file updates; free product upgrades; and 24 x 7 Web support. The program requires a minimum of a Pentium 233MHz processor running Windows 98SE or later with 64MB of RAM and 55MB of free hard disk space.

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