Labs

BullGuard's Internet Security suite includes an anti-virus program, which we reviewed two months ago in Shopper, June 2006, as well as an online backup service, a spam filter and a firewall. The anti-virus program did not do particularly well in our tests, so can the firewall save this product?

BullGuard emphasises ease of use but, although its interface looks neat to begin with, it quickly starts to feel cramped. In Beginner mode the list of programs in the application control system is squashed into a tiny window, which you navigate by dragging scroll bars up, down, left and right. This is tiresome,

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and luckily the Advanced mode opens the list in its own window.

The application control system pops up alerts when a program tries to access the internet. When essential Windows components try to access the internet it alerts you but allows the process anyway. There's no security risk here so Bullguard shouldn't bother you about it.

A single setting allows computers on the local network access to services running on the protected PC. It doesn't disable Windows XP's built-in firewall, and doesn't claim to do so, so you'll need to do that yourself if you want to configure incoming connections without getting confused.

As with most of the firewalls tested in this review, BullGuard's allowed access to all of IIS's services, but adding a rule to allow only web traffic was easy. Our port scan detected that port 135 was also open, which was because the firewall was allowing incoming connections to Generic Host Process for Win32 Services. Unticking this option protects it.

The firewall isn't bad but it's not as good as some of the standalone programs in this test and is bettered by the firewalls included in the security suites from Kaspersky Lab, Steganos and Trend Micro.