F-Secure Internet Security 2007

When we put F-Secure through its paces in January (web ID: 97757) we awarded it six stars, praising it for providing simple security out of the box. This month's Labs confirmed that the antivirus component of the package really does walk the walk: with a superb 93% malware detection rate, it came second only to Kaspersky. Notably, it was one of only four packages to identify the Clicker trojan, and one of only five to identify the Agent trojan-dropper in compressed form, perhaps thanks to the DeepGuard heuristic analysis that's new to the 2007 edition.

Although F-Secure was a breeze to configure and use, our experience wasn't quite perfect. When an infected email was found, F-Secure presented a helpful window detailing what had been discovered, while mail continued to arrive in the background - but this window was too narrow to show all text and couldn't be resized. Whenever a virus was found, we saw CPU usage hit 100% for several seconds.

The Vista-compatible version of the software is still in beta, but seemed feature-complete. CPU usage was high, though, sitting more or less at 100% while infected email was being received. Things should be better in the final release.

Although it's easy to niggle, F-Secure is overall a slick, usable package with a virus detection record to be proud of. While most standalone antivirus packages are cheaper, £30 isn't bad for the full suite - you also get antiphishing filtering, a strong firewall, antispam, and a three-computer licence costs only £5 more.

Author: Arien Graham-Smith