NovaShield monitors the file, registry, process, and network events on your computer and compares the results to internal policies. If a program performs actions that match a description of malicious behavior, an alert will be raised which results in the program immediately being stopped and then removed from your computer (quarantined). NovaShield will also clean up any new files or registry keys installed by the malicious program.

Anti-Virus products do a good job of protecting against known malware i.e. malware that has been reported to a security vendor. Anti-Virus products are not able to protect you against the rising tide of malware variants that are being generated everyday by hackers to infect your computer.

Traditional Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware program monitor what a program says. NovaShield monitors what a program does.

NovaShield protects you from the sophisticated emerging threats of Trojans, botnets, rootkits, and keyloggers in addition to the traditional threats of viruses, worms, and spyware.

Yes, the NovaShield solution is available for both the Windows XP and Windows Vista architectures.

When a program performs actions that are recognized as malicious by NovaShield, the program will be stopped and then moved to an area of your computer where it cannot be executed again (quarantined). NovaShield will also clean up any new files and registry keys that were installed by the malicious program.

Malware is a term that describes any program which performs unauthorized and malicious actions on your computer. It includes the full range of threats such as Trojans, botnets, rootkits, keyloggers, viruses, worms, spyware, etc.

The NovaShield trial version is fully featured. The only difference between a trial and purchased version of NovaShield is that the license for a trial version expires at the end of the trial period (60 days) whereas the license for a purchased version expires at the end of the subscription period (e.g. 1 year).

NovaShield was designed to minimize the use of system resources. You should not notice any appreciable slowdown in launching new programs, opening files, etc. when NovaShield is running.

In contrast to signature-based detectors, scanning is not necessary for NovaShield which uses a specification-based monitoring approach. NovaShield continuously monitors any program run on your PC and there is thus no need to perform lengthy scans of your hard drive.

Because NovaShield does not rely on signatures it does not require daily updates. NovaShield receives updates only for patches and the addition of policies that recognize new types of malicious behavior.

NovaShield Updates include any bug fixes, changes, enhancements, or new features that have been made or added to the NovaShield program including the

• malicious behavior detection engine
• remediation engine
• malware detection policies that help NovaShield determine what software behavior is malicious.
• NovaShield Console

Updates to the software will be made available when new features are incorporated into the software, critical bug fixes are made, and advancements have been made in components such as the malicious behavior detection engine. Updates to the NovaShield software will not be made as often as updates are made to signature-based anti-malware programs (e.g. daily), because NovaShield does not use signatures to detect malware. NovaShield updates will be made opportunistically, and may range from weeks to months between updates.

NovaShield checks every 24 hours. (At the same time every day, at a time chosen randomly when you installed the software.)

If you are away from your computer, NovaShield will display a dialog box notifying you of any updates. If you are logged off, NovaShield will notify you the next time you log onto your computer. If you have chosen the option to have NovaShield automatically install updates, and NovaShield can update itself without needing to reboot your computer, it may update itself automatically at any time. If it needs to reboot your computer, it will wait until you shutdown your computer before installing the updates.

Quarantined malware is moved to a safe location on your system where it cannot perform its malicious behavior. The malware program is also modified so that it cannot execute again unless you use NovaShield to restore the program and allow it to run again. The malware is eventually deleted from your computer in one of two ways:
a) when the number of weeks specified in the Options -> Settings pane have passed since the malware was quarantined, or
b) you delete the alert associated with the malware from the Alerts pane of the NovaShield Console program

One problem that behavior-based malware systems try to solve is to determine whether a running program is performing malicious actions on your computer. Sometimes, good programs will perform actions that may appear to NovaShield as being suspicious or malicious. In rare cases, NovaShield may quarantine a program that it has determined may be malicious, when in fact it is not doing any harm to your computer. For example, some programs such as installers make modifications on your computer that are very similar to modifications that many malware tend to make. If NovaShield incorrectly identifies a good program as malicious, you can add it to the Whitelist and NovaShield will always allow this program to run. It is the goal of NovaShield, Inc. to continuously improve the behavior detection policies so that you will rarely need to add good programs to the whitelist.

The system health indicator is a quick visual indicator of how many suspicious processes you have running on your system. Your system is:
a) Healthy – if there are no suspicious processes running on your system
b) At Risk – if between 1 and 3 suspicious processes are running on your system
c) Critical – if more than 3 suspicious processes are running on your system

You do not necessarily have to do anything. Suspicious processes are programs that you have allowed to run after NovaShield alerted you that their behavior could be malicious. Since you have allowed these programs to run explicitly, they are probably okay. However, because some users will allow programs to run without knowing much about them, sometimes users will allow malicious programs to continue running. Because of this, NovaShield wants you to still be aware that these programs are running on your system.

To help the developers and researchers at NovaShield, Inc., some log information pertaining to NovaShield’s performance and any malware files may be sent in the event that malware is detected or the NovaShield program encounters an error. No personal information is sent, and all reports are anonymous.

These reports will greatly improve the performance, stability and overall ease-of-use of the NovaShield software. They will also inform the researchers of the emerging threats in the world and allow us to increase your overall protection level with improvements to the NovaShield program.

Both versions are fully functional until the expiration date of your particular version. The trial version will stop working completely after the trial period is over. At this time, you will have to purchase the product and enter an activation license key to allow your program to run again. At this point, your trial version is converted into a subscription version.

Your subscription entitles you to all NovaShield software updates to the system for the period of time of your subscription, whether it is one year, or two, or longer. When your subscription expires, the NovaShield software will continue to function properly, but all updates will be turned off. Your system is not really secure at this point, however, because new threats are being continuously created and you will not have access to the new policies that detect these threats.

NovaShield will allow you to purchase a new subscription at any time after your subscription expires.

NovaShield has been designed so that it will work well alongside most security products, and especially signature-based products.