The ThreatSense.Net Early Warning System is a tool that keeps ESET immediately and continuously informed about new infiltrations. The bidirectional ThreatSense.Net Early Warning System has a single purpose – to improve the protection that we can offer you. The best way to ensure that we see new threats as soon as they appear is to “link” to as many of our customers as possible and use them as our Threat Scouts. There are two options:
- You can decide not to enable the ThreatSense.Net Early Warning System. You won’t lose any functionality in the software, and you’ll still get the best protection that we can offer.
- You can configure the Early Warning System to submit anonymous information about new threats and where the new threatening code is contained, in a single file. This file can be sent to ESET for detailed analysis. Studying these threats will help ESET update its threat detection capabilities. The ThreatSense.Net Early Warning System will collect information about your computer related to newly-detected threats. This information may include a sample or copy of the file in which the threat appeared, the path to that file, the filename, information about the date and time, the process by which the threat appeared on your computer and information about your computer’s operating system. Some of this information may include personal information about the user of the computer, such as usernames in a directory path, etc. An example of the file information submitted is available here.
While there is a chance that this may occasionally disclose some information about you or your computer to our threat lab at ESET, this information will not be used for ANY purpose other than to help us respond immediately to new threats.
By default, ESET NOD32 Antivirus is configured to ask before submitting suspicious files for detailed analysis to ESET’s threat lab. It should be noted that files with certain extensions such as .doc or .xls are always excluded from sending, should a threat be detected in them. You can also add other extensions if there are particluar files that you or your company wants to avoid sending.
The ThreatSense.Net setup is accessible from the advanced setup tree, in Tools > ThreatSense.Net. Select the check box Enable ThreatSense.Net Early Warning System. This will allow you to activate and then click the Advanced setup button.