BitDefender 60-Second Virus Scanner protects from the cloud

Bitdefender has released 60-Second Virus Scanner, a cloud-based malware hunter which aims to provide an extra layer of security protection for your PC.

And at first glance this seems to work well. Installation is speedy; there were no conflicts with existing security software in our first tests; and the program really did complete its scan in only 60 seconds.

Unfortunately, as the program must send off its data to the cloud for analysis, the end of the scan doesn’t mean the end of your waiting. We sat looking at a “waiting for server” message for a very long time, and it actually took 281 seconds before a “no viruses found” message was displayed.

The program has only just been released, of course, so you could argue that maybe the servers are just getting more of a hammering than Bitdefender were expecting. But that doesn’t seem to be the whole story, either. Our report revealed that, for all its work, 60-Second Virus Scanner had only scanned 32 processes and 1,415 files: that’s basic, even for a quick scan (especially as this was a fast PC with an SSD).

Could the program play a part on your PC? There’s no doubt it’s easy to use, with a clean and simple interface. Resource use isn’t too bad -- the interface requires around 30MB RAM, but scans don’t noticeably affect the rest of your system – and, once installed, you could probably forget about it and just leave the program to do its job.

And the limitations of the 60-second scans aren’t necessarily a fatal problem, either, because by default the program is also set up to scan critical areas in real time. If that means 60-Second Virus Scanner will check new files as they appear then it could still offer a useful extra layer of malware protection.

Photo Credit: Jirsak/Shutterstock