Kaspersky Lab Internet Security 2010 review

Kaspersky’s Internet Security has always performed well in our tests, and this year was no exception.

The suite’s interface has been polished since Internet Security 2009, but the basic set of features is largely the same, including full email scanning and a personal firewall. A browser plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer warns you of suspicious links.

A simple tabbed interface allows you to run scans, view the status of your applications and run programs in a sandbox environment that prevents them accessing the rest of your PC. It’s not guaranteed to be stable in a 64-bit environment, but we had no trouble running a sandboxed IE window under 64-bit Vista.

Also available from the tabbed interface are Kaspersky’s Security+ features, including a virtual keyboard that you can use to enter confidential information such as passwords without risk from keyloggers. Other Security+ options allow you to make a rescue disk – Kaspersky is one of the very few suites with this facility – and erase your browser cache. Basic parental controls allow you to assign different restrictions to your users, limiting the times at which they’re allowed online and the kinds of sites to which they have access. If that’s not enough control for you, even more advanced settings let you tweak everything from scan sensitivity to firewall rules.

Kaspersky performed brilliantly in our web threat tests, eliminating all traces of 19 threats and rendering one harmless. Most threats were detected and eliminated as soon as they began to download, while other infections were blocked at the originating site.

False positives have sometimes been a problem for Kaspersky but we had no such issues this time round. Pop-ups warned us about the risks of installing programs without digital signatures but didn’t prevent us from doing so.

We’ve found retail boxes of the three-user version of Kaspersky 2010 on sale for £22, which makes this one of the best-value security suites around, as well as one of the most effective. It’s our Best Buy.

See page 2 for benchmark results.

Basic malware protection

We give programs one point for each of the 20 web threats it successfully defended against (for example, blocking the web page that hosts it or deleting the file as soon as it was downloaded) or neutralised (for example, where a virus took hold but was deleted or rendered unable to run after a full scan).

Overall (including false positives)

These are the basic malware protection scores, with half a point deducted for each of our false positive test programs that was detected as a virus or prevented from running properly without manual intervention.

Complete remediation

The basic protection graph shows how many viruses were deleted or rendered incapable of running (for example, by deleting Registry entries that triggered malicious files hidden in a temporary directory). This graph shows only those incidents in which all traces of malware were either blocked or completely removed from the system.