Panda Internet Security 2009
It has more features than any other typical suites, yet it ends up as a mediocre suite for malware detection
In the midyear roundup of the eight security suites, we found Panda Internet Security 2009 at the fourth place with an interface that is very easy to use and also a great collection of several new features. Our first roundup of the year 2009, “Paying for Protection,” placed the Panda Internet Security 2009 at the third place. But, as its performance in blocking the malicious software was not up to the mark, in addition with its inability to counter the effects of some really nasty malware, it slipped to the fourth spot in our mid year roundup. Even after having a new scanning feature that is based on Internet it failed to illicit the required response against some very nasty malware.
Its price is $60 for the single user and $80 for three users as of 24th May 2009, which is somewhat more costly than other suites of same class in the market. It performed well by detecting 97.8% of the samples of password stealers, Trojan horses, bots and several other malware from the library of AV-Test.org. But after keeping out the adware from the samples, the percentage goes a little higher, i.e. 98.1%. This time, its performance was better than the previous one, which was only 93.6 percent for all the malware samples, which became 94.8 percent after the removal of adware from the collection of samples. The ranking of Panda Internet Security 2009 is four out of the eight different similar suites and for all those suites the overall detection rate ranged from a value of 57 percent to more than 99 percent. But in heuristic test, which is a test to know the capability of the suite to detect new unknown malware, its rank was six and it uses a two week old signature files for the required simulation.
There is an area where Panda Internet Security 2009 fared quite impressively by performing much better than the previous testing for spyware detection. Spyware are specifically designed to steal different types of financial information as well as passwords. In the previous testing Panda Internet Security 2009 detected only 69 percent of such spyware, whereas it detected as much as 95 percent of the spyware in the latest testing measures. Again it caught hold of the sixth position, according to the behavior-based detection testing. When it is tested for the behavior based detection it identified 9 out of 15 malware.
There is a new feature included in the latest version of the Panda Internet Security 2009, which is called as Collective Intelligence. The function of the Collective Intelligence is to send a signature or a hash to the Panda servers of the to-be-scanned file that also includes information about the behavior. There is another very useful function of the Collective Intelligence and the function is to compare its own signature files to that of the online database. This way, Collective Intelligence improves the ability of the suite to scan the PC and also the speed of the suite in detecting new malware.
If the Panda Internet Security 2009 is seen from the view of on-access scanning, it can be easily counted among the best suites, but if its on-demand scanning is seen then it is the slowest of all.
Panda Internet Security 2009 contains all of the basic features in addition with some extra features that provide it uniqueness over other similar suites. Some common features include backups, antiphising, parental controls and antispam. It also has an extra feature called vulnerability scanner that checks for any missing patches from the system. There is still some scope of improvement in the features, yet Panda Internet Security 2009 is the one package that contains all of the features we have ever tested. The inclusion of the vulnerability feature is really commendable, as it provides a safe environment to the PC by checking for any missing patches. But there is a thing you will have to take care of. You can’t schedule the scanning; instead you will have to start it manually. You will not find any change in the security status report even after missing of a patch.
You will have to have separate log-in and passwords for each user of the system in the parental control feature. So, it is quite obvious that each of the log-in will have separate profile in order to impose site restrictions. Now, whenever someone starts the web browser he or she finds a pop-window, prompting to enter a password for the parental control log-in., which will be different from the one used for Windows account.
The backup feature of the Panda Internet Security 2009 has the liberty to backup according to types of files like, Office documents, Internet favorites, photos, etc. and to backup in the selected drives & folders. It is not at all difficult to set up a backup, but the backup could not be done in the same hard drive. You will have to use another hard drive or CD-DVD. It also has an antispam option for adding a toolbar and the spam folder to Outlook as well as Outlook Express.
Panda Internet Security 2009 surely has an interface to boast of and the fastest on-access scan, which other similar suites don’t have. But, its mediocre malware detection performance inhibits it from moving up to the number one spot.
Download Panda Internet Security here
