Product Reviews

If you've got an always-on connection to the Internet through a cable modem or an ADSL line, just relying on an anti-virus product and Windows Internet Connection Firewall may not be enough. So it's not surprising that most anti-virus companies, Panda included, have started to offer security packages that bundle together anti-virus software and a personal firewall.

Like almost every other security package on the market, Panda has chosen to take a web approach to the user interface for Internet Security. This is no bad thing, because the presentation and layout are slick and familiar. From the home screen, you can tell at a glance whether any of the security modules needs your attention. This is because items that require user intervention are marked with a yellow alert sign or a red exclamation mark, according to the urgency of the problem.

In all, there are six modules listed on this home page, of which the first two are for anti-virus and firewall protection. After this come the anti-spyware and anti-dialler features, and rounding out the modules listed are the anti-spam and web content filtering features.

Naturally, the anti-virus engine is based on Panda's own Titanium Antivirus product and includes a background scanner that constantly monitors file access to detect viruses. The software can also scan incoming emails for viruses or malicious scripts and can even peer inside ZIP folders to check for any malcontents that might be hiding inside. You can also perform overall system scans and, mercifully, the Panda engine is one of the fastest around - and certainly much quicker than Norton's AntiVirus.

We've seen Panda's personal firewall before as part of the company's Platinum Antivirus package, and even though it's a solid performer there isn't much to set it apart from the competition. It does a good job of blocking off vulnerable ports without the need for any intervention from the user, and it's also relatively easy to customise and configure should you find you need to open a specific

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port for certain applications.

Next on the list is the anti-dialler module, which is designed to block those Internet diallers that change your default Internet dial-up number to a premium-rate one. In the settings menu, you can specify a list of the phone numbers that you want to allow your modem to use for accessing the Internet. Any time your modem tries to dial a different number, it will be barred by the software.

Internet security also includes Panda's new anti-spyware technology. The new module tries to detect and block spybots or trackers that may be resident on your system. Once it finds an errant file, it will not only delete the file itself but also try to erase any entries the spybot has inserted in the system Registry. We checked it by deliberately installing the ISTbar SpyBot toolbar to see whether it would pick it up, and it had no problems blocking it instantly. However, it missed an nCase data-mining tool that the freeware Ad-aware picked up, and Ad-aware also highlighted the fact that the Registry entries for the ISTbar hadn't been removed, even though Internet Security had deleted the core file.

Pretty much everyone who has used email has been affected by spam in one way or another. Internet Security tries to shield you from this menace through its anti-spam filter. This integrates into email clients such as Outlook and watches for incoming emails it thinks might be spam. Those it identifies are moved to a special spam folder. As with any spam protection, it's not 100 per cent accurate at identifying what's what and sometimes comes up with false positives.

The final module is the web content filtering. This is a standard web blocker and the controls are based on website categories such as nudity and drugs. Every time a user tries accessing a website, it's compared to a database to identify whether the user is allowed to view the content. The supervisor can also set up whitelists and blacklists of sites or domains that are allowed or completely disallowed respectively, and the software logs all the pages the user has attempted to visit. As with any content blocker, it can be a little over-cautious. It wouldn't, for example, allow us to check out a book on Amazon covering the history of how the atomic bomb was created.

Overall, Platinum Internet Security is nothing if not comprehensive and covers most bases needed to ensure that a home PC is safe on the Web. However, it's expensive and the truth is that a good anti-virus package used in conjunction with free applications such as ZoneAlarm and Ad-aware would provide just as effective security.