Agnitum Outpost Security Suite Pro

When we tested Agnitum's Outpost mini-suite in May 2006 (see web ID: 84935), we liked its philosophy, but weren't fully satisfied with the protection it gave. Although the package is now more ambitious, the story is the same. On paper, Outpost's focus on potential vulnerabilities rather than signatures sounds clever, but in our malware test it came last, failing to identify more than 20% of threats.

Agnitum's firewall also failed to win us over. When it's first installed, you can start it in "learning mode", in which it raises no alerts and silently builds rules based on user activity - an evidently vulnerable approach. We declined this and found ourselves continually pestered over occurrences that should have been dealt with in the background. On the plus side, it fared well in our penetration test, giving no information whatsoever to the attacker while relaying extensive details to the user.

Outpost did nothing to stop us receiving phishing emails, nor clicking on their links. A blacklist blocked access to 43% of the bad websites we tried to access, but we sailed on to the rest unhindered, and the attempted attacks launched from those pages went undetected. The adaptive spam filter seemed to add nothing to Windows' own junk filter: we can only hope it learns in time.

Finally, once we'd installed it, our test PC took more than two minutes to boot - a full minute longer than the next worst result. This, coupled with the fact that it missed so much malware, means that investing in Outpost simply doesn't make sense, even with its exemplary response to firewall-type attacks.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith