A-M Engines in OAP, Update Interval, The Future of OA++

[dallas7 1]

Online Armor Premium 5.1.0.1331 trial; WinXPproSP3-32...

I am currently tunning the OAP trial alongside Ashampoo Anti-Malware 1.21 which as you may know runs the Ikarus T3 and Emsisoft A2 engines - a simpler but nearly as effective Emsisoft Anti-Malware from the perspective of on-access signatures and heuristic/lists (a2heur, a2trust & a2wl) detection. Being an expert long-term user of Malware Defender, when I determined the T3 and A2 combo to be a superior solution I chose AAM over EAM considering the latter's Manutu integration.

In November I plan on a laptop purchase, leading me into Win7-64 for the first time on a system I own, on which I have decided to use OA++. I am trialing OAP as I did not want to uninstall my licensed AAM. I shut down Malware Defender and disabled its service, of course.

I have AAM set to update every 20 minutes and over the course of several months observed updates occur at least 15-20 times a day, most of the time several will occur back-to-back or every other time over a period of a couple or three hours.

Judging from that behavior and that 0-Day has evolved to 0-Hour, I maintain the OA++ one-hour interval is marginally effective against that threat vector. If anyone thinks a 20 minute interval is nuts, consider it's Ikarus and Emsisoft posting up the new data that rapidly. And it happens to be the default and unchangeable interval used by IKARUS for its virus.utilities AV.

1) Is there a command line (i.e. "oawhatever.exe /something") or a batch file that can be used in Scheduled Tasks to evoke the signatures and rules update?

I have been running Emsisoft A-M 6 Beta on a test system. While it continues with the current T3 engine, the A2 engine is new (engine.dll in v5, a2engine.dll in v6). In separate correspondence with Emsisoft support I learned there are no plans to use the new A2 engine in a future OA++.

2) Considering OA++ is noticeably absent from the Emsisoft universe and featured only at Online Armor, can one expect updates limited to maintenance/patches and/or the abandonment of product development in the near future?

I found that OAP was installed with about 14MB of anti-malware components including the T3 and A2 engines. They're all several months old have not been updated since the install.

3) Since OnlineArmorSetup.exe is built for Free, Premium and ++ installs by choice, are these A-M components vestigial or are they actually needed by OA Premium?

Thank you for your time and patience in addressing my questions and concerns. Cheers.

[Christian Mairoll 231]

Please refer to the official announcement which was just posted:

http://support.emsisoft.com/topic/6042-official-online-armor-roadmap/