Product Reviews

BullGuard Internet Security 8.0 is a collection of tools that's meant to secure your PC against threats from viruses, hackers and spyware as well as generally keeping you safe while online. It consists of four main modules: an antivirus and spyware program, a firewall, a spam filter and a backup program. Unlike many security suites, it doesn't have parental controls or a privacy filter.

You can't fault BullGuard for ease of use. The suite is controlled from a single screen. To access each function, you simply click on one of the buttons in the left-hand pane - for instance, Firewall or Backup. Within a given application, each individual function, such as configuration controls or activity reports, has its own tab. It's a simple, elegant system that always makes it easy to know where you are.

I spy

Configuring the applications is also straightforward, for the most part. There's not much in the anti-virus and spyware program that you can change. You could create a new scan configured to look at some specific location, or reschedule one of the predefined scans, but that's about it.

As you'd expect, the firewall is far more complicated. In its advanced mode, it allows you to specify, port by port, what network activity is allowed and what isn't. Experts will find this level of specificity useful; everyone else will find it baffling. Fortunately, there's also a basic mode which allows you just to specify which applications should be allowed

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to access the Internet.

The spam filter allows you to specify black and white lists. Theoretically, it will allow you to import all the email addresses in your Sent folder into the white list of allowed recipients. In practice, we found this worked with POP3 accounts but not IMAP, which was a little frustrating.

For the most part, the backup program is so simple that there's very little to configure: what files and folders are included in a scan, when the scan should run, and that's about it.

The backup program does have one ace up its sleeve: the BullGuard 'online drive'. As part of the package, you get 5GB of space on BullGuard's server to store your backups safely, which is a nice little extra.

Infection detection

Although it's hard to measure the performance of anti-virus software accurately, BullGuard didn't do badly in our tests. We ran it on a system infected with ten recent viruses, including worms, Trojans and other bits of malware, and it found them all. It also generated far fewer false positives (wrongly identifying a harmless piece of software as a threat) than many of the other security suites we've seen recently; Kaspersky, for instance, is excellent in many respects but a pain for false positives. The firewall successfully prevented us from gaining unauthorised access to our test PC's defences, and protected potential vulnerabilities from being probed over the Internet.

Not to say that BullGuard was without flaws. It didn't automatically update its virus definition files after installation, prompting Windows to nag us to do the update ourselves. This should really have been part of the installation process. We were also a little surprised that no configuration wizard ran automatically after setup was over; tedious as this little bit of hand-holding can be, it's a good way of helping users get the program working in a way that's best for them.

These are relatively minor complaints. Thisis a decent security program, albeit lacking a few features, at a very competitive price.