Product Reviews

Intego has earned a solid name for security products and this new release of its Security Barrier Antispam Edition boosts its reputation further by significantly enhancing its Mac security suite.

Of the suite's three major applications - which can be launched from the Finder's menubar - the biggest improvements have been made to NetBarrier X5, a highly configurable firewall, privacy and the 'antivandal' protection tool.

Our main gripe with NetBarrier X4 was its arcane interface. Now tidied up, its functions are more easily understood and managed. For example, there are two user modes, and when you choose one of the five main firewall settings in Simple mode, a clear animation explains how it affects your Mac.

Alongside protection against trojans and the ability to configure cookie and web banner settings, NetBarrier guards against data theft. Enter the text to protect - for example, your debit or credit card number - and NetBarrier stops it being sent openly over the Internet, although details entered in an encrypted web page will still get through.

The program's antivandal features, which detect intrusion attempts, buffer overflow attacks, port scans and so on, are well implemented. You can set a policy for each type, such as putting the offending IP into a stop list to block future connections for a definable period. For intrusion attempts, you can specify a limit to the number of incorrect password attempts allowed and even build a trusted group, allowing unfettered access from known IP addresses.

What's particularly useful is that you can store these settings in independent configurations, and apply one when surfing the web from home, and another on a public wifi network when your data may be more susceptible to interception.

As part of NetBarrier's simplification, functions to clean caches and browser history have been pushed into a separate

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application - Washing Machine. Several free utilities perform similar tasks, but Washing Machine's ability to schedule cleaning tasks is useful.

VirusBarrier X5 runs in standalone and background modes. The standalone version boasts a garish new look that will appeal to anyone who thought that the epitome of interface design was reached with the release of Kai's Power Tools 3 in the 1990s.

VirusBarrier annexes a hefty share of processor cycles when scanning, without feeling nippy. Even so, it was several times faster than Norton's lumbering AntiVirus. You can speed things up through a handy Turbo Mode, which restricts scanning to new or changed files.

Most of the time you will use background scanning, which didn't noticeably affect performance. In background mode, VirusBarrier now lets you exclude files or volumes from scanning by marking them as trusted zones, which is sensible if you don't need scratch disks or partitions checked.

Most importantly, VirusBarrier proved adept at spotting our test viruses, even those inside zipped files. We also like the way that corrupt fonts and images - perhaps evidence of unknown infection - are highlighted, too. Previous versions offered little choice in dealing with infected files, but, as with Norton AntiVirus, you can now add them to a quarantine zone, a halfway house between ignoring and repairing a flagged file where files can't be opened or read until you deal with them. This is useful where files on your Mac are accessed by unprotected machines.

Compared to Security Barrier's other components, the smartened-up Personal Antispam X5 has functionally changed least since we last looked at it. Like its predecessor, it overrides the built-in junk filters in Apple Mail or Entourage to check email for spam according to criteria, such as content, attachment name or embedded links.

Its results went from slightly worse to marginally better than those from Mail's built-in filter over our test period - we did need to intervene to correct the odd email incorrectly tagged as spam. But a new menu option forwards unrecognised spam to Intego to help it improve its results - which should benefit future versions of the program.

Reasonably priced - although bear in mind the industry-standard subscription nature of its virus definitions - this suite is now easier to use and offers more protection than Norton AntiVirus. However, if you're worried about your data's safety, it's a small price to pay.