ESET NOD32

ESET NOD32 Antivirus, commonly known as NOD32, is an antivirus software package made by the Slovak company ESET. ESET NOD32 Antivirus is sold in two editions, Home Edition and Business Edition. The Business Edition packages add ESET Remote Administrator allowing for server deployment and management, mirroring of threat signature database updates and the ability to install on Microsoft Windows Server operating systems.

History

NOD32

The acronym NOD stands for Nemocnica na Okraji Disku ("Hospital at the end of the disk"), a pun related to the Czechoslovak medical drama series Nemocnice na kraji města (Hospital at the End of the City). The first version of NOD32 - called NOD-ICE - was a DOS-based program. It was created in 1987 by Miroslav Trnka and Peter Paško at the time when computer viruses started to become increasingly prevalent on PCs running DOS. Due to the limitations of the OS however (lack of multitasking among others) it didn't feature any on-demand/on-access protection nor most of the other features of the current versions. Besides the virus scanning and cleaning functionality it only featured heuristic analysis. With the increasing popularity of the Windows environment, advent of 32-bit CPUs, a shift on the PC market and increasing popularity of the Internet came the need for a completely different antivirus approach as well. Thus the original program has been rewritten from scratch and has been given the "NOD32" name both to emphasize the radical shift from the previous version and also its Windows (and 32-bit CPU) compatibility.