Brigade is a relatively new antivirus that is based in Indonesia. Some of the main features of the program are how lightweight it runs, USB flash drive scanning capability, a fairly extensive virus database of over 6,000 items, a USB flash drive guard, and Windows 7 support. Even though the interface may be slightly lacking in the appearance department, it’s nice that it includes more features than the average free antivirus.
The installation of Brigade Antivirus 2011 was straightforward. The program download was only 2.8 megabytes in size and came inside of a .rar file. Amazingly, the setup only required a total of 11 megabytes which makes it one of the smallest around. After the setup was finished the program quickly started. Unfortunately, there is no option to auto update the antivirus from the free version. One will have to upgrade to the Pro version for this capability.
Brigade 2011 offers three scanning modes, the scan all drives, scan USB flash disks, and the custom scan option. The surprising thing is that the scanner is fast and indicative of a well designed engine. The program scans at approximately 5 megabytes per second and about 10 files every second. If one’s curious as to what exactly Brigade 2011 is scanning for simply head over to the check database option. There the publisher has painfully classified each of the virus detected in addition to whether they are Trojan horses, backdoors, adware or viruses. Briefly looking through the list I found conficker, sality, and other up to date virus definitions. Brigade detected four viruses on the test system. They appeared to be false positive shortcuts which were identified as harmful.
In addition, to virus scanning, Brigade 2011 offers a real time shield and also a heuristic protection known as sniper. There is a quarantine, but the detected virus never made it inside. The toolkit 1.0 allows one disable the windows firewall and show hidden files. There is also a ping utility to check network connectivity. Unfortunately, some of the English translations aren’t exactly accurate.
Resource usage is excellent with Bridge antivirus. The program uses approximately 15 megabytes of RAM and about 11 percent CPU power when scanning. When idle, the CPU usage returns to zero and the program utilizes the same about of memory.
