Steganos Internet Security 2006

Steganos takes an unusual approach to the security-suite concept by bundling five separate apps in the one box. This means you have to manage each app separately once installed, which is made more difficult by the lack of consistency between user interfaces. Steganos' argument is that you only install what you really need. This would be fine if it was offering the best choice in each category, but sadly our testing showed this wasn't always the case.

A good example is Webroot's Spy Sweeper to power the anti-spyware component. Although we've no complaints with the latest release of Spy Sweeper, Steganos uses version 4 rather than 4.5, which meant none of its results was enough for a pass.

The anti-virus and firewall are both solid choices, though, being based on Kaspersky products. The firewall is simple to use and effective enough to pass all our tests without a hiccup. Once up and running, the anti-virus component proved equally strong. Just note that after installing the Kaspersky anti-virus component, its client didn't start automatically; we had to do this manually. There was no system scanning during installation, nor did it automatically scan the system upon starting, but in its favour the first 5MB download of updated definitions started without user intervention. And by default, these are then updated every three hours.

Running the AntiSpam module as a separate app to your email client means it should work with almost any client you run, including webmail. But we prefer client-integrated solutions, as clicking on junk/unjunk buttons from the email client toolbar makes training simple. Setting up AntiSpam should have been straightforward using wizards, but despite this informing us that it had successfully grabbed our Outlook mailboxes and enabled AntiSpam to filter them it hadn't. We had to manually set up the relevant proxy to get it to work, which was made more complicated by an all too brief Help file that combined English text with German screenshots. Performance didn't impress us much either: detection rate was on the low side at 83 per cent and false positives high at 3.8 per cent.

Having all these different apps running should mean system resources take a sizeable hit, but as they're all system friendly this isn't the case. However, there's no escaping this suite's poor overall performance in our tests.