Labs

Steganos AntiVirus 2007 is a rebranded anti-virus program developed by Kaspersky Lab. There is no difference between this product and Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6, apart from some different logos and the fact that this package is £8 cheaper than the original Kaspersky-branded one. It includes real-time protection for data that enters the system via email and the web, as well as providing a scanner for files on the hard disk.

This anti-virus program came out top when we last ran our extensive email and web threat tests, so we expected great things. Previously, it found just under 45 per cent of the spyware that we sent

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to the test system, which doesn't sound great but is as good as we've seen, beating market-leading anti-virus programs such as Norton AntiVirus, McAfee VirusScan and Trend Micro's PC-cillin.

This month, we exposed it to a brand new set of spyware and it detected 100 per cent of the files. It found each one while the test system downloaded them from our web server. This is what we hope for in an anti-spyware program. Ideally, spyware should be detected before it's saved to your hard disk, massively reducing the risk of an infection.

This fully featured anti-virus program will also detect most of the email viruses we've encountered, intercepting them as your email program receives infected messages. It also includes a number of advanced protection features that you can enable to lock down your PC and prevent certain changes being made to settings.

Easy to use, remarkably inexpensive and very effective compared with the competition, this is our choice of anti-virus and anti-spyware software. Nothing else comes close for detecting spyware, including dedicated anti-spyware programs, so buying this package means you won't have to spend any more on extra security utilities, save for a firewall.