Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 review

Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 has arrived rather early this year, yet it brings several upgrades that make clear the team hasn't been rushing to release.

The first change you'll notice is the interface, which has received its annual overhaul. The front end uses big, clear tabs and more white space than before: at first glance it looks exceptionally friendly. Unfortunately, behind this clean design lurk a plethora of links and sub-panes, and though the suite is pleasingly configurable, it's not as simple to get where you're going as it is with, for example, G Data.

Naturally, there are some technical updates too. One you might notice is the browser toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox, which now includes a button to launch a mouse-controlled onscreen keyboard. You can use this to defeat keyloggers.

Another new feature is Safe Run, which lets you run any program you're uncertain about in a sandboxed environment where it can't access your system files. Safe Run a browser and you're immune to drive-by downloads. Kaspersky 2010 also makes smarter use of online resources when scanning: bad files can be instantly blacklisted from a central database, while whitelisted files don't need to be fully scanned, saving time.

Other additions include improved rootkit detection, IM monitoring and web advert suppression, but thankfully all these extras don't make Kaspersky a bloated suite. On our test system, the suite added a mere six seconds to boot-up time, including just one extra second of CPU activity after the desktop appeared. The total system RAM footprint with the suite installed rose from 528MB to 611MB – almost as low as Avira's 595MB.

The firewall remains one of our favourites too: as with previous versions, as soon as we attempted to prove the system, Kaspersky leapt in and blocked our attacking PC.

Sadly, when it came to intercepting malware samples, Kaspersky took only a silver medal, with a detection rate of 88% - falling just a smidgen behind the 91% achieved by G Data and Avira. Notably, several of these samples weren't identified by name but were flagged because of their potential behaviour. We'd have liked to see evidence of a more comprehensive database, but such effective behaviour detection is encouraging, as it shows Kaspersky can even intercept threats it hasn't seen before.

If Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 had detected just a few more samples, and if it were just a little cheaper, we could have been be looking at a new A List winner. Sadly, it doesn't quite take the crown in those areas, but it remains a credible and powerful suite that's well worth a look.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith