Product Reviews

Every time you go online, you run the risk of falling prey to hackers, viruses or other Web nasties. You need something you can use to protect yourself. PC-Cillin claims to be able to do just that.

Although primarily designed as an antivirus tool, PC-Cillin does lots of other things to keep your computer safe. It includes built-in firewall software that blocks unauthorised attempts to access the Internet from your computer, as well as hackers' attempts to peek at your system. There's also an 'antispam' tool that filters out junk e-mail. A Web address filter prevents anyone who's using your PC from looking up inappropriate content. There's even a Privacy Data Protection filter that stops you, or anyone else using your PC, sending sensitive data (your credit card details, for instance) over the Internet. For 40 quid, that sounds like a bargain!

Unfortunately, not everything that glitters is gold. The Web address filter, for instance, is impractical. It contains no preset list of blocked sites. To decide what can and can't be viewed, you must either set up a general policy defining what constitutes appropriate content, or else specify a list of sites that are allowed, and block everything else. The first option will only really block sites containing porn or other inappropriate material if you set a policy that's so restrictive it blocks legitimate sites too - and that will soon lead to frustration. The second option is unworkable: the Internet contains millions

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of Internet sites, and 5,000 new ones come online every day. How could you ever decide which ones were suitable?

The antivirus element of this package isn't particularly impressive, either. The last time we looked at PC-Cillin was in May 2002, it failed to detect our harmful Visual Basic scripts, and allowed the unleashed virus to destroy the test machine's installation of Windows. Two years on, we were still able to sneak every one of our scripts onto the system and run them. This is just not good enough - and neither is the software's inability to detect the Trojan backdoors we introduced. We'd used a number of ways to disguise an old 'favourite', Back Orifice 2000 - but we needn't have bothered. Even in its original version, unprotected by any cloaking techniques, the virus slipped through the net. The built-in firewall did prevent us from controlling the victim PC remotely, which is some consolation, but the virus really shouldn't have been able to get past PC-Cillin in the first place.

The suite isn't all bad, though. The firewall, in particular, has some very good features. It's easy to set up and use, and allows you to switch between different modes, which you can edit according to your specific needs. This is a handy feature for laptop owners who use dial-up outside the office, as well as a networked connection at work. You can switch between paranoid 'Direct' rules to more trusting 'Office' settings with a couple of clicks. The privacy filter successfully prevented us from posting our details on to the Web - although we still feel a little uneasy about listing all our innermost secrets in one place. The spam filter blocked 85% of all spam e-mails sent to our account, which isn't bad going.

It's a real shame that PC-Cillin is let down by its Web site filtering and antivirus tools. If these components had been just decent and solid - without even being outstanding - this could have been a great value software suite. As it is, we just can't recommend a security suite that can't even detect and destroy four-year-old viruses.