Kaspersky Internet Security (2013)

Malware writers are constantly developing new attack techniques, and their counterparts working for good likewise develop countermeasures to match them. To reflect this constant evolution, the designers at Kaspersky Lab have decided to stop labeling their security suite with year or version numbers. If you go to the store to buy Kaspersky Internet Security ($79.95 direct for three licenses) you won't see "2013" on the boxes (though the year still appears in the program's title bar).

Those already using the 2012 edition will get the update automatically, and probably won't notice a lot of changes. The designers have worked to streamline program usage, cutting down on alerts and popups and eliminating unnecessary options, and the installation process requires fewer steps, but there are no sweeping changes.

You will notice the new Safe Money feature, an evolution of the previous edition's SafeRun for websites. But your only hint that the antispam and antiphishing engines are new will be enhanced accuracy. The brand-new automatic exploit protection and process-execution control likewise stay below the radar. These features definitely showed their merit in my hands-on testing.

Lengthy, Effective Malware Cleanup
The suite's antivirus protection is exactly the same as what's found in Kaspersky Anti-Virus (2013), so I'll simply summarize that review here.

To supplement its traditional signature-based malware detection, the antivirus relies on real-time cloud-based detection by the Kaspersky Security Network (KSN). The KSN database of known good and bad files helps speed scanning; the antivirus submits unknown files to KSN for analysis.

For full protection KSN must be turned on, but there's a catch in regard to my testing. During my earlier testing of Kaspersky PURE 2.0 Total Security , KSN received all of my malware samples for analysis. It's had a couple months to chew on those, giving it a possible unfair advantage in this new test. There's nothing to be done about that, except keep it in mind when considering the current tests.

Kaspersky installed without incident on ten malware-infested systems, and a quick scan by Kaspersky's standalone Virus Removal Tool solved minor startup problems on the other two. Cleanup took quite a while, with most systems requiring at least one "special disinfection" and many needing more than one full scan.

Kaspersky detected 89 percent of threats and scored 6.5 points for malware cleanup. It detected 100 percent of rootkits and scored 9.4 points against those. All of these are top scores among products tested with my current sample set. As you can see in the chart below, Kaspersky PURE didn't score nearly as well. The article How We Test Malware Removal explains my scoring system.

Good Malware Blocking
Kaspersky's Web Anti-Virus did a good job blocking download of malicious files either at the URL level or during the download process. It wiped out many pre-downloaded samples on sight; I launched the few remaining samples and notes its reaction.

Kaspersky detected 89 percent of the samples, the same as Kaspersky PURE, but earned 8.7 points for malware blocking, beating PURE's 8.4 points. Daily Safety Check Home Edition and SecureIT Plus detected 97 percent of these samples; SecureIT tops the list with 9.7 points. For details on how I calculate these scores, see How We Test Malware Blocking.

Kaspersky also gets high marks from independent testing labs. All of the labs that I follow regularly include Kaspersky in their testing regimens, and it routinely scores at or near the top. The chart below summarizes recent independent tests. For more about the independent labs, please read How We Interpret Antivirus Lab Tests.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/0SzmkHNRFnk/0,2817,2409124,00.asp

nba all star weekend malin akerman jeff carter chomp national enquirer kate gosselin helicopter crash