FOR AVIRA ANTIVIRUS DOWNLOAD

The bottom line: An aggressive redesign aimed at making its best-known suite more accessible than before, Avira Free Antivirus 12 combines fast scans with above-average protection for a solid security combo.

Review:
Free antivirus maker Avira debuts a laundry list of changes in its latest major update, basically repositioning the suite to remain competitive in the face of tougher competition from other free security suites and a renewed emphasis on performance from paid competitors. From the new breezy installation to the modernized interface and reputable security, the suite has a lot going for it.

However, it notably lacks some features that many people consider basics even at the free level, so this version may only wind up appealing to existing Avira users and fans.

Longtime Avira fans will note that the suites also have undergone a bit of a name change. The product title "AntiVir" has been dropped, as Avira AntiVir Personal becomes Avira Free Antivirus, Avira AntiVir Premium becomes Avira Antivirus Premium, and Avira Premium Security Suite becomes Avira Internet Security. While product-specific names may work for some companies because of legacy associations, such as the Norton product from Symantec, new user confusion has likely forced security suite makers to streamline their operations.

The suites have also skippped version 11, perhaps driven by a Spinal Tap-esque fear of exploding amps, and gone straight to version 12. It's also possible that the company was thinking of aligning the version number with the release year, as most security suites released in the fall have version numbers that reflect the coming year.

Anyway, the new install is the simplest of the major free security suites. The two-click process will auto-detect competing security components and remove them, so be warned if you think you're going to be more secure by running two overlapping AVs. Avira won't let you.

Another click will take you past the Ask.com toolbar and search engine re-direct, but at least Avira is polite: it's an opt-in, not opt-out, experience. The toolbar screen itself is a bit unclear: it's actually Avira's WebGuard feature, powered by an Ask.com search engine that's part of the toolbar. There's also an option to have Ask.com become your browser's default engine, although that's not checked by default.

At the end of the installation process, Avira will begin a quick scan. On our test machine, it took about 1 minute, 25 seconds to complete, a completely reasonable wait to endure before the suite is ready to go.

Interface
The new interface is simple and mimics that of many competitors. A left nav shows you your tools, while the center pane focuses on a deeper dive into your security. New on-off buttons make it easy to toggle features, although it's noteworthy that the free version is quite restricted when compared with the free competition.

The new main interface for Avira Free Antivirus 12.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

A red banner with the program name serves as a wrapper to anchor the suite, with a Windows XP-style menu bar above it. It doesn't look bad in Windows 7, although it is definitely archaic. The only feature that you can't reach from any other part of the interface except the menu bar is the Help menu.

The main interface is the Status window, with a green check box letting you know when you're safe. It turns to yellow when there are security tasks to perform or when you've turned off a feature, like real-time protection. It turns red when there's something mission-critical that requires your attention.

Below that, you've got two categories: PC protection, and Internet protection. What this really means is that the former protects you from threats locally, while the latter guards you against new threats from attacking you. Under PC protection, you can toggle your real-time protection, manually run a scan, start an update, or upgrade to a paid version of Avira. Use the gear icon next to each option to open the configuration window, which has its own slider in its upper-left corner to quickly change between the standard view and expert mode.

One hint about the system scanner option from the left nav: this is where you would go to initiate specific types of scans, or scans on specific parts of your computer, such as a rootkit scan in C:/Windows. For a generic scan, use the Scan System option from the Status window.

Under Internet protection, you only get one option in Avira Free: Web protection. If you chose to not install the toolbar, then this entire section will appear grayed out.

It doesn't sound like much, but that's the point. This is the easiest-to-use version of Avira yet.

Features and support
This is one area where the changes Avira has made are not so apparent. Longtime users of Avira Free are not likely to recognize much new. The scanner checks for virus, Trojans, rootkits, and adware. There's a generic threat removal engine, but Avira--like many security suites--is much better at preventing threats from infecting you, rather than removing ones you've already got.

The advanced options menu doesn't contain much that's new, either, but the layout is new, and it's quite easy for a savvy person to drill deep into security settings and either extract the information they want or set a very customized level of security. This includes scanning as Administrator from the main interface, a window showing realtime scan performance, configuring how to scan of archives, and a restart reminder in case you enjoy that kind of automated nagging.

The engine powering the scans has been improved, too. Your Hosts file is protected by default, and resource usage has been slashed. And after the daily virus definition file update, Avira still takes over your screen with a pop-up asking you to upgrade.

The company told me that it kept it because its users like it. According to its market research feedback, the pop-up apparently reminds people that they've been protected. Be that as it may, I find it an unnecessary distraction that blocks me once a day from doing something more important than clicking away an ad.

If a problem is discovered, a one-click Fix problems button appears at the top of the Status window. Click it, and even if the fix is something as simple as reactivating a deactivated module, the program will do it for you.

The WebGuard feature, available only if you install the Avira toolbar, takes a more aggressive approach to detecting sites that could be hosting malware before they load on your computer. This is not unlike Avira's competitors. However, for the performance cost to the browser for a toolbar, search result ratings would be a nice compensation. Too bad they're not offered.

Avira 12's WebGuard toolbar.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Features-wise, the free version provides the kind of security that most people will be comfortable with. For people who want more, Avira Antivirus Premium 12 ($29.99 for a one-year license) comes with a suspicious behavior guard for when programs or files that might be trusted act in an unsecure manner; the silent/gaming mode for fullscreen use; and live telephone support. Avira Internet Security 12 ($49.99 for a one-year license) rolls in parental controls; an e-mail spam guard; antiphishing measures; and a firewall that I found to be obnoxiously chatty and intrusive.

While the firewall and parental controls are always relegated to premium status, it seems quite niggardly of Avira to reserve the silent/gaming mode for premium users, when competitors don't and all the while insisting upon a pop-up that can interrupt any activity you're using your computer for.

Performance
Avira's performance in the past has been hit or miss, with strong detection rates but high false positives. Avira's been doing a lot of work in that area, though, and this is one of the best-performing versions of Avira that we've seen.

Avira Free Antivirus 12 shares the same detection engine as its premium upgrade siblings, Avira Antivirus Premium 12 and Avira Internet Security 12, so all three are discussed here.

In a real-world test, Avira completed its initial scan during installation in 1 minute, 25 seconds. However, the new Avira still does not whitelist known safe files on your system, so repeated scans will check out the same file, even if it's got a hash that indicates that it's been unchanged since the last scan. The Full scan averaged 1 hour, 36 minutes over three installs, which is an appropriate benchmark for such a resource-intensive scan.

found that Avira benchmarked well in most system tests, but with room for improvement in the critical test of boot-time impact. Note that while last year's benchmarks were tested on the basic installation of Windows 7 x64,  Labs is now using a Windows 7 x64 test bed running Service Pack 1. So while results are more comparable than they would be with, say, a Windows XP computer, there's still a notable difference between the test computers.

Avira Internet Security 12 performed had one of the smallest impacts on computer start up, slowing it down only by 13.1 seconds when the average was 25.3 seconds. However, Avira Free Antivirus and Avira Antivirus Premium slothed along and added nearly 60 seconds each, the two worst suites tested so far this year.

Once we get past that poor first showing, Avira tested better than average on nearly every system test we looked at. As the chart below shows, shutdown time, scan speed, and the in-use system tests of MS Office performance, iTunes decoding, and were almost always better than average, often by a lot. Avira was weak on the Cinebench test.

Security program	Boot time	Shutdown time	Scan time	MS Office performance	iTunes decoding	Media multitasking	Cinebench
Unprotected system	40	6	n/a	395	120	342	17,711
Average of all tested systems (to date)	65.3	15.4	1,114	415	125	347	17,106
Avira Free Antivirus 12	98.8	12.4	860	409	125	345	17,000
Avira Antivirus Premium 12	100.3	12	1,026	407	125	342	17,125
Avira Internet Security 12	53.1	13.7	959	407	124	346	17,030

Note: All tests measured in seconds, except for Cinebench. On the Cinebench test, higher numbers are better.

Independent testing agency  has marked acceptable scores for Avira Premium Security Suite 10 (Avira Internet Security as of version 12) during the first two quarters of 2011. On a Windows 7 computer during Q1, Bitdefender scored 4 out of 6 on Protection, 3.5 out of 6 on Repair, and 4 out of 6 on Usability, for an overall score of 11.5 out of 18, just clearing the minimum of 11 for an AV-Test.org certificate.

In the second quarter, on a Windows XP computer, the same suite did slightly better. The suite hit 3.5 out of 6 on Protection, 4.5 out of 6 on Repair, and 4 out of 6 on Usability, for a total of 12 out of 18. However, at that point Avira hadn't updated the detection engines in a while.

When AV-Test.org tested Avira Premium Suite Security 10.2 in July and August of 2011, Avira climbed a bit higher, with a 4 out of 6 on Protection and Repair, and 4.5 out of 6 on Usability, for a total of 12.5 out of 18.

Note that AV-Test.org defines its categories as follows: "The 'Protection' covers static and dynamic malware detection, including real-world zero-day attack testing. In case of 'Repair,' we check the system disinfection and rootkit removal in detail. The 'Usability' testing includes the system slowdown caused by the tools and the number of false positives."

Third-quarter results aren't in yet, but results shared by AV-Test.org with CNET indicate that along with the new name, the suite has made some significant improvements in the level of protection offered. It notched a 99.73 percent malware detection rate, higher than the overall average rate of 99.29 percent in September 2011 certification testing. The suite was able to remove 87.5 percent of active malware infections, slightly higher than the industry average of 84.6 percent. AV-Test.org did not test or did not release numbers for rootkits. In AV-Test.org's zero-day attacks test, Avira Free blocked 92.7 percent of threats, while the two premium suites blocked 96.4 percent of the attacks, compared to the average September 2011 certification results of 92.7 percent. The suite also did not find any false positives against more than 330,000 samples.

In short, AV-Test.org found Avira 12 to be more effective than Avira 10, although there were suites both paid and free that did better.

The most recent AV-Comparatives.org Whole Product test, which looks at on-demand scanning, retroactive tests, and "real-world" guards including cloud-based protections, puts Avira Premium Security Suite 10 in the top four suites tested. The August 2011 test found that it blocked 98.4 percent of attacks and threats thrown at it, only behind Trend Micro's Titanium and Symantec's Norton. Meanwhile, looking at Whole Product test results cumulatively from January 2011 to August 2011 found that Avira 10 did far worse, coming in ninth with a 97.0 percent success rate. So, while Avira started the year off rough, it has clearly made strides to improve and that bodes well if you're considering using version 12.

A third testing lab, Dennis Technology Labs, had much worse news for Avira from its January 2011 test. In its test of high-end suites, including Avira Premium Security Suite 10, Dennis Labs placed Avira second to last out of 11 suites. Avira had an Accuracy score of 28 out of 100, but this did not include false positives. The Total Accuracy score, which does include files that are marked as threats but in fact are not, also put Avira at second to last with a score of 64.5 out of 150. Avira struggled with the lab's Protection test, earning only a 66 percent, second to last and well below the average of 84 percent. The bottom line here is that Dennis Labs and Avira 10 did not mix well, at all.

It's fair to conclude that according to third-party tests, Avira 10 tested weakly at the beginning of 2011, but has made strides to improve and should not be discounted. Still, movement in the right direction is not the same as consistent performance, but things are looking up for Avira at least when it comes to protecting its customers.

Conclusions
Avira Free Antivirus 12 is a solid effort by one of the most popular, and therefore most trusted, security suite makers to address an ever-changing and increasingly more dangerous threatscape. It offers solid and effective free protection, with a newly accessible interface, but it lacks some of the competitive features that other free suites give their users. Also, depending on your system, you might have to prepare for much longer computer startup time, and there's that daily pop-up nag to contend with. We're glad to see that Avira has no intention of straying behind the pack anymore, however, we expected more from this long-overdue update.

Publisher's Description

From Avira:

If you don't have virus protection, your PC will be infected with malware in a matter of minutes. Avira Free Antivirus 2012 offers basic protection against viruses, worms, Trojans, rootkits, adware, and spyware that has been tried and tested over 100 million times worldwide. What's more, it is available free-of-charge. It not only protects against these types of malware, but offers as well, in case of an infection, the possibility of removing viruses very easily and repair the system automatically.

Functions: AntiVir stops all kinds of viruses; AntiAd/Spyware protects against adware and spyware; AntiRootkit detects hidden rootkits; QuickRemoval removes viruses at the push of a button; NetbookSupport support for computers with low resolution; AHeADTechnology detects even unknown viruses by their profiles; AviraSupport there for you in person when questions arise.

FOR ESET NOD32 ANTIVIRUS 5 DOWNLOAD'

The bottom line: Back from the nearly dead, or at least the un-updated, ESET returns with high-level security that's light on your system. For a basic antivirus suite that's light on your system and tough on malware, NOD32 gets a yes from us.
Review:
The last time ESET updated its two security suites--the antivirus and anti-malware-only NOD32 and the more feature-heavy alternative Smart Security--it was a different computer security world. It was March 2009: Anonymous barely existed, Stuxnet hadn't gone public, and ransomware was the stuff of science fiction.
Version 5 of ESET NOD32 is a solid, creative attempt to create a suite that adapts to a rapidly changing threatscape, with an emphasis on generic detections and the now-commonplace reliance on both cloud and locally stored detections. Where NOD32's bigger brother Smart Security 5 left us wanting more in the ancillary features department, the area that many don't consider "core" security, NOD32 strikes a perfect pitch between features, price, and effectiveness.

Installation
ESET's installation could be faster, although it's by no means sluggish. It's slowed down by a preponderance of screens, including registration, and an unnecessary query as to whether or not the user wants Potentially Unwanted Program (PUP) protection activated or not. While a legitimate query, there's no reason for it to slow down the install by yet another screen to click through.
PUPs are definitely a security issue, though, so perhaps the program ought to just scan for them on the first scan automatically, and then ask you if it's a scan you always want.
One decent thing about the registration process is that it's all done from within the suite--no need to jump to your browser. Also, there's no reboot required after the installation. Still, the one-minute-or-less installs from Norton and Trend Micro should be a goal that all security suites aspire to.
Interface
The layout of ESET 5 remains unchanged from version 4, except for minor details, although neither is quite as easy to use as it ought to be. The interface opens to a window indicating your security status. The default is colored green and labeled Maximum Protection, which changes to red and a warning when core security features, such as Network Protection, have been disabled. The center pane doesn't indicate this very clearly, but the plain text Maximum Protection labels that tell you which parts of your computer and activity are protected are actually links. Click one to drill deeper into your settings, toggle features, and gain more granular control over your security.
The left nav lets you access other features, including Computer Scan, Update, Setup, Tools, and Help. To the interface's credit, each tab's layout is kept similar, and there are helpful mouse-over tooltips that help clarify things like the differences between default scans, but key features, like the Advanced Settings window, are hard to find.
Along with a lack of clarity about how to get around ESET's interface is the confusion created by redundancy. There's nothing gained by making things harder to find, and even savvy users will probably have to take more time than necessary to get up to speed.
Features and support
ESET NOD32 5's core features put the suite at or near the top of its class. Its collection of features, while not revolutionary, are nevertheless extremely well implemented. What it lacks are many of the modern ancillary features that justify the higher price.
On the side of the basics, there are two default scans: a "Smart Scan" and a custom scan. ESET has improved its antivirus and antispyware engines so that they don't detect only threats, but prevent your host files from corruption before the bad guys go after you. There's removable media control, so you can block USB keys or external drives from connecting to your computer, and the new gamer mode automatically initiates silent running whenever a program is running at full screen. This is perfect for movies and presentations, as well as games. You can also activate it from the system tray.
ThreatSense, ESET's cloud-based detection, isn't new--yep, it had it three years ago--but it's been expanded in version 5 to include reputation analysis. All of that comes in the basic NOD32. Upping to Smart Security gets you antispam, parental controls, and a "smart" firewall that learns how your computer uses the Internet very quickly.
ESET's browser guards are browser-agnostic, and don't require an extension. You won't get search results ratings, but ESET successfully blocked us from attempting to reach known dangerous Web sites clicked on in search results.
It's not too much of a stretch to say that ESET owns the Support space. In addition to the hot-line support, forums and knowledge base, no other security suite offers an education module like ESET does. Called "Cybersecurity Training," the module features an interactive city that you can explore to learn about how to protect yourself, your personal data, and your computer when online. It's an in-depth approach that we wish other vendors would take, because at the end of the day, it's going to be your own wits that keep you safest.
It's accessible from the installation CD if you buy the physical boxed copy of the program, and we're not sure just yet about how to launch it from the downloadable version.
Performance
ESET's overall performance presents a reliable security option. It's not the most effective security suite we've seen this year, and the benchmarks leave room for growth, but overall it's a solid, secure choice, with low false positives and a light touch on your computer's performance.
Real-world test results for ESET were confusing. On our real-world test computer, an x86 Windows 7 laptop that we use for all hands-on testing of security suites, ESET scans were invariably slow and ponderous. On average, the first scan took nearly two hours, and subsequent scans were only faster by about 20 to 30 minutes. These marks did not match up to CNET Labs' results, which found ESET's scan times on a freshly imaged computer to be among the fastest results we've seen so far this year. Because of the large number of programs that get installed and uninstalled on the real-world laptop, which could adversely affect the computer's Registry, we're inclined to favor the labs results in this case.
CNET Labs' benchmarks found both ESET Smart Security 5 and ESET NOD32 5 to have performed generally well above average. Note that we can't directly compare this year's results with last year's because we upgraded our testing computer from Windows 7 x64 to Windows 7 x64 with Service Pack 1.
Smart Security slowed down the Labs' computer boot time by an average of 17.2 seconds--five seconds faster than the average of all suites tested to date this year--whereas NOD32 5 added an impressively low 13.9 seconds. For both programs, ESET's boot time impact was minimal.
Both suites had a small impact on the computer's shutdown time, slowing it down only by about six to seven seconds longer than an unprotected computer. However, it should be noted that the shutdown time for an unprotected computer was half that, so even though ESET's impact was minimal when compared with other suites, it's still having a big affect on the computer itself.
On all of CNET's in-use system performance tests except for the Cinebench test, ESET's impact was extremely minimal. The Cinebench results were close to the average level of impact. So, all things being equal, you're not going to notice much when ESET is running as you go about your computing business. This was borne out by our real-world tests, too.

Security Program	Boot time	Shutdown time	Scan time	MS Office performance	iTunes decoding	Media multitasking	Cinebench
Unprotected system	40	6	n/a	395	120	342	17,711
Average of all tested systems (to date)	63.0	15.8	1,136	416	125	348	17,112
ESET NOD32 5	53.9	12	727	411	124	342	16,946
ESET Smart Security 5	57.2	14	658	401	124	343	17,148

*All tests measured in seconds, except for Cinebench. On the Cinebench test, the higher number is better.
In independent threat detection and removal tests, the new version of ESET holds its own but doesn't achieve top marks in all areas. In the  test on Windows 7 from the first quarter of 2011, the previous version of ESET, Smart Security 4.2, squeaked by with a passing score of 12.5 out of 18 overall. The suite had a 4.0 rating out of 6 in Protection, a 3.0 in Repair, and a 3.5 in Usability.
The second quarter 2011 test, on a Windows XP computer, definitely showed improvement in some areas and regression in others. It scored 13.5 out of 18 overall, a solid midrange score. The suite improved in Protection with 4.0, a small uptick in Repair performance with 3.5, and a big improvement in Usability to 5.5 out of 6. The Usability score looks at, among other metrics, how many False Positives a suite detects. So even though version 4.2 was based on a nearly three-year-old engine, the suite was still able to improve quarter-over-quarter.
Third-quarter results aren't in yet, but version 5 beta results shared by AV-Test.org with CNET indicate that the suite has made serious improvements over version 4.2. It notched a 98.5 percent malware detection rate, equal to the overall average rate during May 2011 certification testing. Still, that wasn't as high as some competitors, such as Bitdefender. The suite was able to remove 95.7 percent of active malware infections, significantly higher than the industry average of 85.7 percent. In AV-Test.org's zero-day attacks test, ESET blocked 87.8 percent of the attacks, compared with the average of 80.5 percent. Still this wasn't as good as Bitdefender, which blocked all of the attacks. ESET also did not find any false positives.
 Conclusion
ESET returns to a tougher security world, not just from the competition but from the threats that it's meant to protect you against. Though the benchmarking is generally solid, we found the interface too annoying and the installation too cumbersome to award it higher marks.

FOR AVAST ANTIVIRUS DOWNLOAD

 

 

The bottom line: Avast continues to push the envelope of top-shelf free security features with hybrid update tech, file reputation analysis, and more. It's independent benchmarks are a bit weak, but more than 150 million people trust Avast to keep them safe.
Review:
Looking to compete with both paid and free security suites, Avast wants to create a unified approach to your computer security. Long gone are the days of the quirky interface. Avast is accessible and robust, with an impressive list of free features and strong, though hardly stellar, performance benchmarks.

Installation
Avast has improved its installation process so it's faster than before. It's not the fastest on the market, not by a longshot, but a standard installation took us about three minutes.
Some items of note during the installation that will come up later in the review: to avoid the new Windows 7 and Vista desktop gadget, or the new WebRep browser add-on, you must choose the Custom install option and uncheck those here.
Automatic installation of these features is frowned upon, although Avast does provide a clear method for uninstalling them. It's just not as simple as a check box that gets its own installation window, since you have to go through the Customize menu, which makes the auto-install sort of surreptitious.
The current versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer both block forced add-on installation. When you run one of those browsers for the first time after installing Avast, they'll ask you if you want to allow the new add-on.
On the plus side, installing Avast doesn't require a reboot, and using its uninstall tool we detected no remnants in the Registry or on the desktop. Avast has said that the installer has shrunk for all three versions by about 20 percent, although it's still a large download at around 70MB for the free version.
A new Avast installation option, available only from the custom install menu, lets you sideload Avast as a secondary security program to supplement your main one. We're not big fans of this option from a security point-of-view, because it can bog down your system resources without actually making you safer. However, for seeing if you like Avast, it's not a bad thing as long as you remember to choose one security suite to go with.

Interface
Avast 7's interface hasn't changed much over the past three versions. There've been some decorative changes, a darkening of color here, lightening of grays there, but the changes have been either lightly cosmetic or utilitarian. For example, there are big graphics to illustrate the more nebulous security concepts that only have an on-or-off switch. This may sound useless, but it's actually quite clever because it helps you visualize how one of the more complex Avast features is keeping you safe without bogging you down in jargon.
Highlighted with the familiar security colors of green for safe and red for dangerous, the Summary tab gives up-to-date info on shield status, auto-updates, virus definitions, the program version, and whether the silent/gaming mode is on. There's also an unobtrusive ad urging you to upgrade to Avast Internet Security 7 if you're using the free version, and an option to connect an Avast account. (This is for the Avast Web management tool, expected to be live about a month from when this review is published.)
The Summary tab contains two submenus, Cloud Services and Statistics. The former shows you how Avast's servers help protect you, and offers a Settings button.
The latter is for those intrepid folks who're curious to see how Avast's shields have been performing against threats. It's where you can get your math geek on. For each shield, it tells you how many files were scanned and when, and presents the data in a concise graph.

Avast 2012 includes a hybrid update technology for pushing out security updates to you faster.

(Credit: Avast)

The scans live in the second tab, where you can choose and adjust four default scan types plus a custom scan option nestled into the bottom right corner. Real-time shields live in the third tab, and again the clean interface comes into play here as navigating what could be a mess of options and tweaks is instead dead simple. Shields are listed on the left, or you can choose one from the interactive shield wheel in the main window.
Click a shield to reveal a real-time chart of what the program's been defending you against, with a Stop button and settings options at the top of the window. Another button at the top takes you to the advanced settings for that shield, and links at the bottom expose the shield's history as a graph and export a log file.
The Additional Protection tab leads to the AutoSandbox, Browser Protection, Remote Assistance, and Site Blocking tools. Avast Pro Antivirus and Avast Internet Security users also get Antispam, Sandbox, and SafeZone options. The Maintenance and Market tabs round out the options. As you might expect, Maintenance is for updating the program, checking out quarantine (called Virus Chest,) and managing your subscription, while the Market tab is a new option for buying extra security components.
Features and support
While these tools are clearly non-essential, and some of the prices struck as high--$10 for a Rescue disc? $50 for an annual backup service?--we like that Avast gives its fans a chance to stay in its eco-system. The Avast EasyPass, for example, is an Avast-branded version of RoboForm's premium password manager and is well worth the $9.99 annual fee.
Avast 2012, aka Avast 7, includes several new features that directly impact your security. One of the biggest changes is a hybrid update technology that pushes out updates in real time. Because a full database update isn't required, Avast users will get their security updates much faster than before. Full database updates will also be pushed out, just not as frequently.
Another important security change introduces a file reputation system for evaluating downloads. This tech has existed for a couple of years in paid security suites like Norton, Kaspersky, and Bitdefender, but Avast is the first free antivirus to offer it. It leverages community data from Avast's enormous active user base to help determine if a file is safe.
Avast's WebRep browser add-on for instant Web site safety evaluation has been extended to work with Safari, and it will also now check for fake certificates. Faked security certificates were an unexpected problem last year, demonstrating how fragile Web security protocol could be.
In a half-day of testing, none of these appeared to cause any negative impact on computer or browsing performance. Assuming these technologies work as advertised, your computer ought to be a fair bit safer from malware with them.
And although we're more than half a year away from Windows 8, Avast has included some attention for the forthcoming Windows 8 beta, also known as the Consumer Preview, gets some attention from Avast as the suite includes an Early-Load Antimalware Driver (ELAM) for guarding against system-level rootkits.

Avast's browser add-on now works in Safari (not pictured), and paid users can force their browsers to always run sandboxed from a single checkbox.

(Credit: Avast)

The free version of Avast is arguably the most comprehensive set of freely available security features on the market. There's a reason these guys have more than 150 million active users (at the time this review was written). The antivirus, antispyware, and heuristics engines form a security core that also includes multiple real-time shields. Along with the new features, it's got an AutoSandbox for automatically walling off suspicious programs; a full complement of shields that guard against scripts, P2P networks, instant messaging, and potentially dangerous program behavior; a silent/gaming mode; on-demand boot scanning; and a healthy output of statistics for the data nerds.
Avast's sandbox, by the way, automatically places programs in a virtualized state when it suspects them of being threats. It walls off suspicious programs, preventing them from potentially damaging your system while allowing them to run. As the program runs, the sandbox keeps track of which files are opened, created, or renamed, and what it reads and writes from the Registry. Permanent changes are virtualized, so when the process terminates itself, the system changes it made will evaporate.
The company hasn't said whether the virtualized state begins after the program already has access to your system, so it's theoretically possible that it could be compromised. There's not a single security feature in any program that hasn't been been compromised at some point, though, so "theoretically hackable" is true of all security features. The AutoSandbox will now advise you when you're done using it as to how best to handle the program in the future.
The AutoSandbox for free users is different from Avast's paid-upgrade sandbox, and the paid upgrades to Avast Pro and Avast Internet Security include both the automatic version and the older, manually initiated version.
You can access the AutoSandbox settings from the new Additional Protection option on the left nav. It defaults to asking the user whether a program should be sandboxed, although you can set it to automatically decide. There's a whitelist option for programs that you always want to exclude from the sandbox, or you can deactivate the feature entirely.
In addition to these core security features, Avast has some nifty extras to help you out. The Troubleshooting section now comes with a "restore factory settings" option, which makes it easier to wipe settings back to a familiar starting point, and comes with the option to restore only the Shields settings, leaving other changes untouched, like permanently running in silent mode.
There's a sidebar desktop gadget for Windows 7 and Vista, and you can set automatic actions for the boot-time scan. Available under the Scan Computer tab, the boot-time scan customizations give you far more flexibility in managing the lengthy and time-consuming boot scan.
Meanwhile, new in Avast Free is the Remote Assistance feature, for single-instance, friend-to-friend remote tech support. Part of the main Avast interface, all the other person has to have is...Avast.
It's a good way to get others to install the program, but this isn't the only single-serving tech support option around. Still, in our tests, it worked fine. One person shares a code with the other, and voila! Instant remote PC access. Simply close the window to break the connection.
Avast doesn't offer an on-demand link-scanning feature, like AVG and Norton do, although the company says that the way that Avast's Web shield behaves ought to protect you automatically from any malicious URLs by automatically preventing the URL from resolving in-browser. A page will appear letting you know that Avast has blocked the site because it is suspected to contain a threat.
There weren't many big changes for Avast Pro Antivirus or Avast Internet Security users, but there were improvements made to the Safe Zone and Browser Sandbox features. The Browser Sandbox now lets you force Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, or Safari to always run sandboxed away from your system. SafeZone now automatically asks you when you're about to perform a browser-based financial transaction if you'd like to switch to the SafeZone mode.
Performance
As far as Avast's impact on system performance goes, in a real-world test Avast completed its scans in a timely yet not blazingly fast manner. A Quick Scan took about 20 minutes, and the Full Scan took 59 minutes. RAM usage was surprisingly light, with Avast only eating up about 16MB when running a scan.
CNET Labs determined that Avast has a fairly light touch on your computer's performance. Avast Free 2012 scored well below the average impact on startup time, and had the least impact of all suites tested on your PC's shutdown time. Scans were faster than average, beating big names like Norton, Kaspersky, and Bitdefender, a tad slower than AVG, but not as fast as Trend Micro or Webroot.

Security Program	Boot time	Shutdown time	Scan time	MS Office performance	iTunes decoding	Media multitasking	Cinebench
Unprotected system	40	6	n/a	395	120	342	17,711
Average of all tested systems (to date)	67.4	16.2	1,058	414	125	347	17,129
Avast Free Antivirus 2012	55.2	9.6	800	412	126	347	16,976
Avast Pro Antivirus 2012	69.8	11.3	732	402	126	343	17,148
Avast Internet Security 2012	63.6	12.2	831	407	125	346	17,060

*All tests measured in seconds, except for Cinebench. On the Cinebench test, the higher number is better.
Avast performed better than average on the MS Office test, around average on iTunes Decoding and Media Multitasking, and a bit worse than average in our Cinebench test. On the key end-user experiences of its impact on your startup and shutdown times, and scan time performance, Avast won't make you want to walk a plank out of frustration.
All the security features in the world do you no good if they don't keep you safe, and on that count Avast performs well in general. However, as results from independent efficacy testing groups indicate, Avast could've had a better 2011.
AV-Test.org gave the previous version of Avast a passing rating in its most recent test, on a Windows 7 computer from December 2011. Avast 6 barely passed with the minimum passing score of 11 out of 18. It reached 4 out of 6 in Protection, 3.0 out of 6 in Repair, and a 5 out of 6 in Usability, for a total of 12. Usability includes testing for false positives, which Avast suffered on.
AV-Comparatives.org also saw room for improvement in Avast during November 2011. The suite blocked only 93.6 percent of threats tested during that month, which could then be kicked up to a more respectable 95.9 percent with some settings tweaks by the user. Looking at January 2011 to November 2011, Avast did much better, blocking 95.6 percent outright and bumping to 97.5 percent with adjusted settings.
As far as certification goes, Avast received the Advanced+ certification from AV-Comparatives for the first half of 2011, but only Standard certification in the second half. Right now, we doubt that this is going to cause much consternation among Avast fans, but a full year of weak scores could smite the ardor of even the most enthusiastic fan.
Judging from these results, Avast has to make some changes to its detection rates quickly to convince people that its strong feature set is worth it.
Conclusion
When it comes to your security, Avast 2012 gets a lot right. It's got a usable, uncluttered interface, solid although not stellar benchmarks, and a set of features that keeps it at the forefront of Windows security.
It's true that the changes to the suite better improve its performance in efficacy tests or there could be serious problems, but for now we've got three key reasons for enthusiastically recommending Avast Antivirus Free 2012 as an Editors' Choice for free security suite. First, it's got the most aggressively forward-thinking feature set of the free suites. Second, it's very good at protecting you. It's not the best at it, but it does what it does well, and that leads to the third reason it's earned its award: it protects you without dragging your PC into the mud. Few people want security that makes a good machine run like an old one, and on that count, Avast has your back.

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The 2013 updates to the Kaspersky protection suites bring to consumers some of the most advanced security technology currently available. It involves introducing an exploit prevention engine as part of the security suite, but also a Safe Money banking protection tool that you can interact directly with. The suite's scans aren't the fastest, but it definitely will protect you.
Installation

Installing Kaspersky has been dramatically simplified over the past two years. Following on 2012's fuss-free install, the installer for 2013 will remove conflicting security programs and any detected malware automatically.
You're still on the hook for a reboot, but not when running only the trial. The install procedure was only three screens long, and it took under 2 minutes to complete. You can also register and purchase a license key from the program itself, no need to jump to your browser. Overall, this is one of the best installation processes for a security suite, if by best you mean, "short, fast, and painless."
Interface

Kaspersky's followed up last year's overhauled interface with only minor tweaks this year to accommodate new features. The number of windows you must go through to initiate a scan, or to solve a problem warning, has been reduced.
Based on a mobile app-drawer design, the interface presents your security status at the top and stashes the four major security features of scanning, updating, the new Safe Money, and parental controls, at the bottom. The app drawer layout puts key security status information up front, and keeps your tools organized yet easily accessible below. You can slide the features sideways to see more options, or click the arrow at the bottom to pull up, drawer-style, the full list of options. Settings and Reports live in the upper right corner, and both use terminology repeated throughout the interface. This creates a solid level of consistency, and ought to appeal to basic security consumers and power users alike.
A Cloud Protection button at the top of the interface opens a screen that explains Kaspersky's cloud technology that debuted in the 2012 version. Like its competitors that have already incorporated cloud-based detection, you can opt out of anonymously contributing your data without making yourself less safe.
Kaspersky's opt-out is a bit tricky to get to, though. Hit Settings, the annoyingly unlabeled Advanced Settings tab (hint: it's the cardboard box), Feedback, and then uncheck the box to opt out.
Unlike some competitors, which allow you to reorder the tool buttons so you can have the ones you use most often at the ready, Kaspersky's tool layout is locked down. This is one of the few drawbacks to the design. Another is that in the Settings window, the tabs on the left are unlabeled and their icons are not necessarily as obvious to understand as possible. In order, they are Protection Center, Scan, Update, and Advanced Settings.
Labeling aside, the settings themselves were remarkably easy to navigate and comprehend -- even the advanced ones. Meanwhile, jumping from feature to feature was a zippy experience, and we encountered absolutely no lag when skipping between screens.
Features and support

Kaspersky 2013's newest and best features come in the form of some very forward-thinking security improvements.
The most important of them is the exploit blocking engine called Automatic Exploit Prevention. It's a response to the increase in the number of phishing attacks and includes an antiphishing engine -- similar to the antivirus and anti-malware engines -- that updates daily.
It's hard to overstate how critical stopping exploits can be to stopping large-quantity cash thefts from online banks. Experts have estimated recent successful banking breaches at scoring from $3 million to more than $220 million, and Kaspersky says that the exploit prevention engine stops the vast majority of exploit kits.
A major component of the exploit prevention engine is Address Space Layout Randomization, or ASLR. It's a proven security technology, used in Apple OS X and iOS, in Google's Android, and by Microsoft in Windows 8. It's not foolproof, but it is one of the more effective security technologies currently available. The inclusion of ASLR in Kaspersky means that the technology will be available to Windows 7 and earlier versions, making Kaspersky unique in the security realm for that reason.
The suite now blocks Duqu and other malware specifically designed to surreptitiously install on your computer before the antivirus program loads during boot.
Safe Money revamps the Safe Run feature from previous years and is only in Kaspersky Internet Security 2013, not Kaspersky Anti-Virus. It basically streamlines the process of accessing banking sites securely. Simply go to your banking site, and as long as you have Kaspersky's browser add-ons installed, it will ask you if you want to open the site in a sandboxed mode, isolated from other browser and PC processes. You can also manually add other sites to Safe Money in Kaspersky's interface, but it's no longer a requirement because of Safe Money's new auto-detection. You can tell it's running because of a thin green line around your browser window.
We were skeptical about Safe Money working as advertised, but it really does detect banking Web sites as you visit them and reopen them in sandboxed browsers. It detected both major banks like Chase, and our own local credit union's site without fail.
Other changes have been made, as well. The secure keyboard for protecting personal data when entered by a physical keyboard works with more sites than before; there is expanded browser compatibility so it now works with Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Opera; and better battery management has been implemented for laptops. (We did not test the battery life, however, due to time constraints.)
There are older features worth calling out, too. One is the File Advisor, which is a Windows Explorer context menu option for checking out a file's reputation without having to go through the main Kaspersky program itself. It creates a pipeline from the Kaspersky Security Network, the Kaspersky cloud protection, to the files on your desktop. We found it to pull down reputation data quickly, although its speed also depends on your Internet connection.
The Roll Back feature can easily undo damage caused by any malware that does slip through, and the Network Monitor feature shows you real-time traffic to and from your computer. Among the better ancillary tools are an Internet Explorer security analyzer, which is a good idea if you're stuck on Windows XP with IE8 or earlier -- but it's weird that it doesn't support any other browsers.
The virtual keyboard, different from the physical keyboard protection, has been improved so that it's more responsive than previously. It's mostly an older feature to use if you're worried about keyloggers that Kaspersky keeps around for bragging rights. It's highly unlikely that you'd have Kaspersky running and be infected by a keylogger.
Unchanged from last year, online support is decent, with the standard offerings of forums, live chat, knowledge base articles, and telephone support. Live chat isn't as robust as with some competitors, only available from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern time, Monday through Friday. The telephone support is similarly restricted from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., Eastern time, Monday through Friday. The tech-support number is buried fairly deep on the Kaspersky site, probably to discourage calls. They can be reached at 781-503-1820 or 1-866-525-9094.
Performance

Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 (KIS) shares the same detection engine as its less feature-laden sibling, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012 (KAV), so both are discussed here.
Kaspersky historically doesn't focus on speedy scans as much as its competitors. For most of the scan's duration on a real-world computer, it promised to complete in less than 3 minutes, when in reality it took an average of 8 minutes, 10 seconds to complete over three runs. Meanwhile, the Full scan tightened up and completed scanning in 1 hour, 32 minutes -- that's about average for Full scans. The Rootkit scan took an average of 8 minutes, 32 seconds.
CNET Labs' benchmarks bear out these findings. The in-lab scan time for KIS took 1,286 seconds (just under 22 minutes), faster than last year's 1,320 seconds and yet one of the slower scan we've seen this year. KAV took 1,227 seconds, also faster than last year's and still one of the slower scans this year.
The Lab found Kaspersky to nearly perfectly mirror last year's results. Boot-time impact was atrocious, with KIS slowing down boot by 47.3 seconds and KAV adding 68.3 seconds. Shutdown impact was much better, with KIS adding only 6.3 seconds and KAV adding a stunningly small 4.5 seconds. On MS Office, iTunes decoding, media multitasking tests, and Cinebench, the two suites were around average. However, Kaspersky feels light when in use, and it transitioned smoothly among its different features and when jumping to other programs.
We did notice some rare, temporary browser hangs, most likely because of the multiple Kaspersky add-ons.

Security program	Boot time	Shutdown time	Scan time	MS Office performance	iTunes decoding	Media multitasking	Cinebench
Unprotected system	40	6	n/a	395	120	342	17,711
Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2013	108.3	10.5	1,227	432	125	345	17,038
Kaspersky Internet Security 2013	87.3	12.3	1,286	429	124	343	17,128

Note: All tests measured in seconds, except for Cinebench. On the Cinebench test, higher numbers are better.
As far as threat detection and removal go, there are no numbers available yet for Kaspersky 2013. But the most recent tests with Kaspersky 2012 show that the Russians know a thing or two about keeping your computer safe. Independent testing agency AV-Test.org has marked consistently high scores for Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 during the first two quarters of 2012.
On a Windows 7 computer, Kaspersky scored 5.5 out of 6 on Protection, 6 out of 6 on Repair, and 5 out of 6 on Usability, for an overall score of 16.5 out of 18, clearing the minimum of 11 for an AV-Test.org certificate. This is a marked improvement from a total score of 14 last year at this time.
Note that AV-Test.org defines its categories as follows: "The 'Protection' covers static and dynamic malware detection, including real-world zero-day attack testing. In case of 'Repair,' we check the system disinfection and rootkit removal in detail. The 'Usability' testing includes the system slowdown caused by the tools and the number of false positives."
The most recent AV-Comparatives.org Whole Product test, which looks at on-demand scanning, retroactive tests, and "real-world" guards including cloud-based protections, puts Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 in the top three suites tested from January to May, 2012, and in the top five suites of May 2012.
The May 2012 test found that it blocked 99.1 percent of attacks and threats thrown at it, an improvement from 98.3 percent last year at this time. Meanwhile, looking at Whole Product test results cumulatively from January 2012 to May 2012 found that Kaspersky 2012 blocking 99.3 percent of threats, and could be 0.1 percent safer depending on user adjustments.
It's fair to conclude that according to third-party tests, Kaspersky has been highly effective over the past year since two out of the three tests we looked at gave it solid marks. Kaspersky has definitely improved its protection rates over the past year, but it still could do better when it comes to its impact on your system.
Conclusions
Kaspersky's 2013 suites pack a lot in, but aside from the way they will cause some performance lags on your computer, there's one other drawback to them. These are not cheap pieces of software. Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2013 will set you back $59.95, and Internet Security 2013 retails for $79.95. Those are steep prices to demand, especially when the free suites offer similar protection. Kaspersky's hard sell comes from the smooth-functioning advanced security it offers, even at the Anti-Virus, fewer-featured level. Offering the exploit protection in the entry-level suite shows that Kaspersky places your safety above the upsell -- otherwise it'd only be in the Internet Security suite. Both will protect you, but unless you want the parental controls or the Safe Money features, we lean toward Kaspersky Anti-Virus.

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 he bottom line: Low-impact performance, strong security, and useful features are the hallmarks of Norton AntiVirus 2012, one of the best antivirus suites available.

Review:
Editors' note: Portions of this review are based on CNET's review of Norton Internet Security 2012.
Over the past few years, Symantec has completed a course reversal for its Norton consumer Internet security suites. The massive package of security tools works better than it ever has before, with an impressive set of features, some useful new tools including remote management and download stability analysis, and third-party security efficacy benchmarks that are at the top of the heap. Meanwhile, CNET Labs' performance benchmarks indicate that though Norton doesn't leave the smallest footprint on your system, users should see a minimal impact overall.

Installation
For the third year in a row, Norton's formerly sluggish beast offers a smooth and fast installation operation. Once you run the installer, the program is ready to operate in about a minute--impressively fast, and doubly so considering past performance. The installation process is also the first time that you will interact with Quorum, Norton's behavior-based detection engine. You'll be asked to participate by sending anonymous data to Symantec's cloud. Opting out of the data submission, according to Symantec, will not affect your security.
Running the trial of Norton also requires registering the program. Like many programs, Norton used to force open your default browser and take you to the company's registration Web site. Now you can register from within the program. Uninstalling the software left about 10 Registry entries behind, but no other traces were detectable. Overall, Norton's installation experience was fast and hassle-free, with a minimum of configuration options--but the ones that did come up appeared necessary.
Interface
Norton AntiVirus 2012 contains some changes to the 2011 interface, although the design is heavily reminiscent of the previous version. It keeps the dark theme, punctuated by yellow text, and the contrast works well. Changes this year include a reorganized and streamlined Settings interface; a "pinnable" Advanced screen--so that power users can get about their business faster--which also comes with a CPU gauge; and tweaks to the System Status indicator. This year, the interface feels more balanced between the feature display and empty space.
The simplified layout offers Scans on the left, Updates in the center, and Advanced tools on the right. Clicking on one reveals controls specific to that area of protection. At the bottom of the interface is a wide, short map of the world covered with blinking yellow dots. Each one, according to Symantec, represents a threat to one of its users that has been successfully blocked. The Activity Map visual is cute, but completely irrelevant to your personal safety. More interesting is that below the map there are a series of mobile app-style buttons. In NIS you can access the new Norton Management, Norton Mobile, Norton Online Family, Norton Safe Web, and Norton Backup without having to jump to your browser. NAV only has the Activity Map and Norton Backup.
Features and support
There aren't many new features in Norton AntiVirus 2012, but what's new ought to appeal to the kind of person who wants the souped-up security in this robust suite.
One of the better new features is a change to Download Insight. This community-driven tool originally evaluated files being downloaded for security, but now it looks at their stability for other Norton users, too. There are also metered bandwidth options for people on rate-limited connections, and several interface tweaks to make the program easier on the eyes and to make it easier to find things.
The reputation-based security checks where your programs were installed from and when they were installed, and compares that against data from the 58 million users participating in the crowd-sourced Norton Community Watch to see if any of your programs should be red-flagged. Norton's System Insight component has been bumped up to version 2.0; System Insight is the proprietary internal network that warns you when your programs unnecessarily hog system resources. This gives some extra heft to the system performance map, where you can click on any spike and see what caused it.
The third iteration of Download Insight applies the same reputation-based logic to new downloads, and the fourth version of Norton SONAR (Symantec Online Network for Automatic Response) looks for suspicious software behavior and automatically chooses protective actions. You can toggle how aggressive SONAR is in the Settings window.
Along with the quick scan, the full-system scan, and the custom scan for viruses and malware, you can now have Norton scan your Facebook wall for malicious links. There are also on-demand reputation-based quick scans, full scans, and custom scans for users who want Norton to immediately scan their installed programs. After completing a scan, Norton provides users with a summary report. More-detailed information, including scan duration and a deeper dive into threats discovered, can be read under the History option from the main window. There's also a link that you can follow in case you believe that Norton missed something in its scan, although as reputation-based protection matures, on-demand scanning becomes less of an issue when compared with the "always-on" protection offered here.
The bootable recovery tool isn't new, but it now comes with a feature that automatically creates a CD, DVD, or USB-based bootable device. The USB component is especially important on optical-drive-free systems such as Netbooks.
As with the rest of the program, the support options have been streamlined behind a drop-down menu in the top right of the interface. Help opens local support, Tutorials leads to a Web site with extensive how-tos, and the Get Support link accesses the breadth of Norton's customer support in a new window. Here, users can chat with tech support 24-7, explore the user manual, and check out the Norton FAQ and knowledge base. Phone support is also available, although Symantec takes part in the trend to make phone support harder to access by funneling users to online resources.
Performance
Norton's fast installation and comprehensive feature set would be useless without solid performance, and Norton Internet Security 2012 delivers extremely high third-party efficacy benchmarks and strong performance benchmarks.
In a real-world test, Norton 2012 completed a Quick Scan in 2 minutes, 43 seconds; the Full Scan took 1 hour 43 minutes and 54 seconds. While the Full Scan average is comparable to last year's, the Quick Scan was approximately 1 minute and 30 seconds slower than last year's average.
CNET Labs' benchmarks found both Norton Internet Security 2012 and Norton AntiVirus 2012 to have performed well, although not as strongly as some of their competitors. Note that we can't directly compare this year's results with last year's because we upgraded our testing computer from Windows 7 x64 to Windows 7 x64 with Service Pack 1.
NIS 2012 slowed down the Labs' computer boot time by about 11.8 seconds, one of the fastest scores this year, whereas NAV 2012 added an unimpressive 21.2 seconds. This is in line with previous years, which saw NIS do better on boot than NAV.
Both had a very small impact on the computer's shutdown time, slowing it down only by about 4 seconds compared with an unprotected computer. Scan times for both were disappointingly average in the Labs; in previous years, they were aggressively competitive. However, our in-use system performance tests, the iTunes decoding, Microsoft Office, media multitasking, and Cinebench tests, showed both Norton suites having a low-level impact on our test computer. This means that, all things being equal, you're not going to notice much when Norton is running as you go about your computing business.

Security program	Boot time	Shutdown time	Scan time	MS Office performance	iTunes decoding	Media multitasking	Cinebench
Unprotected system	40	6	n/a	395	120	342	17,711
Average of all tested systems (to date)	63	15.8	1,136	416	125	348	17,112
Norton AntiVirus 2012	61.2	9.9	1,154	403	125	344	17,007
Norton Internet Security 2012	51.8	10.3	1,066	410	123	343	17,386

*All tests measured in seconds, except for Cinebench. On the Cinebench test, the higher number is better.
In independent threat detection and removal tests, Norton is a top performer. In the AV-Test.org test on Windows 7 from the first quarter of 2011, Norton Internet Security 2011 scored 15 out of 18 overall, one of the better suites tested. The suite had a 5.5 rating out of 6 in Protection, a 5.0 in Repair, and a 4.5 in Usability.
The second-quarter 2011 test, on a Windows XP computer, definitely showed improvement in some areas and regression in others. It scored 13.5 out of 18 overall, a solid midrange score. The suite improved in Protection and Repair with a 5.0 rating out of 6 for both, but Usability dropped to 3.5 most likely due to false positives.
Third-quarter results aren't in yet, but results shared by AV-Test.org with CNET indicate that the suite continues to perform well. It notched a 98.94 percent malware detection rate, higher than the overall average rate of 97.31 percent in August 2011 certification testing, but not as high as some competitors, such as Bitdefender. The suite was able to remove 83.3 percent of active malware infections, only slightly higher than the industry average of 80 percent. In AV-Test.org's zero-day attacks test, Bitdefender blocked 100 percent of the attacks, compared with the average August 2011 certification results of 92.16 percent. The suite also did not find any false positives.
The most recent AV-Comparatives.org Whole Product test, which looks at on-demand scanning, retroactive tests, and "real-world" guards including cloud-based protections, puts Norton Internet Security 2011 toward the front of the class, out of 17 suites tested. Looking at Whole Product test results cumulatively from January 2011 to June 2011 found that AVG came in 13th, blocking 99.1 percent of threats.
Dennis Technology Labs, a member of the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO), found in January 2011 that Norton Internet Security 2011 earned an overall protection score of 142 (PDF), tied with Trend Micro. Norton also had zero false-positive warnings during the test.
Following the path blazed by Norton 2009 through 2011, Norton continues to build a strong performance record based on excellent detection, fast scan times, and low false positives. However, it's clear that according to some tests, there's been some small slippage.
Conclusion
Norton AntiVirus 2012 contains only core security features. All the useful extras you'll have to upgrade to Norton Internet Security to get. In that respect, NAV is much too similar to the free security suites out there, and unless support or the slightly better protection is a major priority for you, we recommend one of those instead.

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The bottom line: Following on last year's big overhaul, Trend Micro makes a series of smaller changes to this year's Titanium security suites. While we loved the baked-in mobile support, free storage, and file encryption, inconsistent benchmarks hold the suites back.
Review:
Last year was a headliner for Trend Micro's security suites. Overhauled with a lightweight interface and cloud-based detection, and rebranded as Trend Micro Titanium, the changes made the suite competitive again. The 2012 version builds on those improvements, so this year doesn't have a lot of big changes. Still, there are enough substantial changes to make this version worth upgrading to, including a broader detection base and strong mobile support for both iOS and Android.
Trend Micro's updates for 2012 make some substantial yet largely under-the-hood changes to the Titanium suites. Several excellent features only available in the premium Titanium Maximum Security place the most high-end version above its siblings. However, the cost will likely cause many shoppers to balk at the upgrade.

Installation
The new Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2011 sports a rapid-fire installation. Once you've completed downloading the installer, the entire process is over in less than a minute. There's one screen where you're asked to fill in an e-mail address before you can run Titanium Maximum Security, but that's the extent of the registration hoops that are required. Although a reboot isn't mandatory, the program seems to run better after one.
You can also disable your contributions to the Smart Protection Network, Trend Micro's behavioral detection net, during installation. Doing so won't make you less safe. It will only prevent your data from becoming part of Trend Micro's analyses.
Interface
Titanium 2012 offers a marginally different interface from last year. The two differences are that the parental controls and system tuner have swapped places on the main screen, and that you can now apply skins to customize the interface. Not exactly world-shaking alterations, which is an acknowledgment of how the company feels last year's major overhaul is doing. In a word: great! (Well, the company thinks it's great, anyway. We certainly don't mind it either.)
The UI that debuted last year was different and minimalistic, and is a great choice for people who don't want to struggle with their security. The top quarter is taken up by a large icon and bar declaring your security status, and below it are three major security fields and a registration status indicator.
In these three quick-access slots are the Security Summary, System Tuner, and Parental Controls. Click the boldface name of one of the three to open a drop-down revealing more information; for example, under Security Summary, you'll see number and type of threats stopped. This perhaps could be phrased better, since if no threats have been detected on your computer, then you will see that "0 threats have been stopped." Accurate, yes, but slightly misleading, too.
The Support link lives in the upper right corner of the interface, marked by a text link and an icon of a boat's lifesaver ring. At the bottom of the interface live a one-click scan-on-demand button to initiate a Quick Scan, a drop-down arrow to change scans, a Settings icon, and a Security Report button for jumping to a screen that collects recent threat detection, system performance, and parental control notifications into charts and graphs.
For advanced security features, you must click on the blue Tools button in the bottom-left corner. It's the only blue button link in the interface, so it stands out well. Clicking on it reveals six smartphone app-style buttons for Parental Control, Data Theft Prevention, System Tuner, the Trend Micro Vault for online backup, Secure Erase, and the Tool Center. Each one has a status indicator letting you know if it's been activated.
The Tool Center opens the Web site for Trend Micro HouseCall, which is a free, online-only tool for removing malware.
Clicking through the others takes you to a landing page for each, which comes with an option to hide the landing page in the future. Since the landing pages only contain brief descriptions of the features within, it'd make more sense to spare you the bottleneck and put the descriptions somewhere else.
Within each tool is a sharp layout of features and instructions on how to use them. The interface is that rare combination of uncluttered and helpful, bringing the featured tools to the fore without feeling overwhelmed. And although each tool opened in a new window, it opened smoothly and replaced the window below it so that the main Trend Micro pane was always easily accessible. If only other complicated programs were this well-designed.
Features and support
The big new feature last year was that Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2011, like Google Chrome, instituted automatic updates, removing the necessity of updating your virus definition files. The autoupdates in Titanium theoretically led to a higher level of security that was more responsive, too. The behavioral-detection approach worked well for Norton, Panda, and Microsoft. No doubt moving detection to the cloud made the program run with less interference in your system, and after a year, it's hard not to conclude that it is effective.
You can still schedule scans in Titanium, which you can do from the Virus and Spyware Controls panel under Settings. On that same tab, you can configure how Titanium handles various other security protocols.
In its 2012 version, Titanium adds two new engines to the fold. One is designed to detect and remove the "fake antivirus" type of malware, also known as ransomware, that plagues many people. The other stops botnets that might have infected your computer.
Titanium Maximum Security does offer the kind of robust, full-featured protection that's expected from a top-shelf security suite. Along with antivirus, anti-malware, and malicious link protection, Titanium Maximum Security protects your installed applications from being altered without your permission, optimizes the Windows firewall, and provides spam guards. There are also parental controls, identity guards for protecting credit card numbers and passwords, the aforementioned Department of Defense-standard file shredding, and the Trend Micro Vault, which is a remote file lock that will seal off files when you tell it to, say if your laptop has been stolen.
Trend Micro comes with a toolbar that autoinstalls only in Firefox and Internet Explorer. But for a few exceptions, security suites have been ignoring Chrome, which is a serious miscalculation in our opinion. It's reminiscent of schools of art that get ignored until they become cultural leaders: are the makers of consumer security suites simply not taking Chrome seriously yet? Or do they feel that it's too secure of a browser to be susceptible to social-engineering attacks that other browser users suffer from? We suspect the former, although the security companies' sluggishness implies either willful ignorance or the latter.
You can deactivate the toolbar in the Settings window after you install, although it's a bit annoying that you can't turn it off before you install. Internet Explorer 9 indicates that running the toolbar slows down the browser's start-up by 1 second. It also doesn't really contain much in the way of features, besides giving Titanium hooks into your browser so it can evaluate Web site search results.
Titanium did well with value-added features last year, introducing the system tuner, Wi-Fi verification, and online backup. The system tuner is quite robust and cleans your Registry, looks for recoverable disk space, cleans out start-up links to programs that no longer exist, deletes Internet cookies, and removes software histories including instant message logs to prevent spyware from accessing them. The Internet hot-spot verification will warn you if you're connecting to a network that's been compromised The online backup tool includes a leading 10GB of encrypted online storage. It includes syncing and sharing, and there's an option to purchase unlimited storage space.
Value-added enhancements in Titanium 2012 cover both the useful, like bundling one free license for Trend Micro's Smart Surfing for Mac, and the gimmicky, like the aforementioned selection of new interface skins for the Windows version. Does anybody spend so much time in their security suite that they want to skin it?
An excellent new "extra" is mobile security. Titanium Maximum Security 2012 comes with free licenses for iOS and Android security apps, which offer lost-phone tracking, antivirus, and SMS blockers. The Trend Micro toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer warns you about malicious links posted to Facebook and Twitter, as well as search, although there's no support yet for Google Chrome.
The Titanium firewall component generally relies on the excellent Windows Vista and Windows 7 firewall to get the job done. It does come with a firewall booster option, under Network in the Internet and E-mail Controls tab in the Settings menu. This activates the network-level firewall, which is a component that Windows is missing, but Trend Micro clearly doesn't think it's crucial, as the firewall booster is disabled by default.
There are some hang-ups with Titanium, though. For one thing, you can't access the interface while the program is starting, although you can when scanning. A more troublesome problem is that the suite doesn't really possess much in the way of virus and malware removal. It presupposes that it will block all threats that attempt to crack your system. As noted above, Trend Micro's HouseCall tool is the company's de facto post-infection threat killer, and it's Web-based. That may make some users skittish.
Performance
In its first year on the street, Titanium's new detection system proved itself handily. Although it wasn't the most effective suite last year, it was certainly in the upper echelons of security offerings. This year, CNET Labs and independent third-party testing organizations found that Titanium has continued an upward trajectory that nevertheless leaves room to grow. Titanium Maximum Security 2012 shares the same detection engines as its less feature-laden siblings, Titanium Internet Security 2012 and Titanium Antivirus 2012, so all three are discussed here.
CNET Labs' benchmarks showed that the Titanium suites were frustratingly uneven. The Quick Scan was the fastest CNET Labs has tested so far this year, with the slowest of the Titanium suites coming in at more than 400 seconds faster than the second-fastest suite, and they also had the lightest touch on computer shutdown times. However, Titanium had the biggest impact on system boot times, with the Titanium suite that was fastest at boot still adding 20 seconds more than the next-slowest competitor.
In the era of security-suite-free Windows 7 computers that often take no more than 30 to 40 seconds to boot, and tough competition from Macs and Chromebooks that can boot in 20 to 30 seconds, doubling Windows' boot time is unacceptable. Note that CNET Labs has changed test computer operating systems, from a 64-bit version of Windows 7 to Windows 7 64-bit running Service Pack 1, so while we can mention the differences between last year's results and this year's, they're not directly comparable.

Security program	Boot time	Shutdown time	Scan time	MS Office performance	iTunes decoding	Media multitasking	Cinebench
Unprotected system	40	6	n/a	395	120	342	17,711
Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2012	88	11.3	502	437	125	345	17,290
Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2012	94.8	11.7	465	406	126	344	17,238
Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus Plus 2012	83.3	12.4	449	419	126	342	17,084

*All tests measured in seconds, except for Cinebench. On the Cinebench test, the higher number is better.
On a real-world Windows 7 computer, we found that the Quick Scan finished up in 4 minutes, 48 seconds, when averaged from three cold-boot runs. Also over three cold runs, the Full Scan took 2 hours and 11 minutes to complete. These times are interesting to note because they're much slower than last year's results, and much slower than the results Trend Micro predicted. It's not clear why the Quick Scan took nearly 4 minutes longer on average to complete than it did last year. We're going to chalk up the problem to a software glitch or installation error for now. Certainly, if you're seeing Quick Scan times that slow, get in touch with Trend Micro's tech support.
Third-party labs that look at the efficacy of virus detection and removal found Trend Micro 2012 equally uneven. While scoring high on threat detection and blocking from independent testing agency AV-Test.org, and earning low false-positive scores (that's a good thing), the Titanium suites did not do well on infection removal. During the first quarter of 2011, when tested on a Windows 7 computer, Titanium Internet Security 2011 scored 3.5 out of 6 on Protection, 3.5 out of 6 on Repair, and 5.5 out of 6 on Usability for an overall score of 12.5 out of 18, just above the minimum of 11 for an AV-Test.org certificate.
In the second quarter, on a Windows XP computer, Titanium Internet Security 2011 scored the same, 12.5 out of 18. The suite hit 4.5 out of 6 on Protection and Usability, and 3.5 out of 6 on Usability. Note that AV-Test.org defines its categories as follows: "The 'Protection' covers static and dynamic malware detection, including real-world zero-day attack testing. In case of 'Repair,' we check the system disinfection and rootkit removal in detail. The 'Usability' testing includes the system slowdown caused by the tools and the number of false positives."
Third-quarter results aren't in yet, but results shared by AV-Test.org with CNET indicate that the suite continues to perform well. It notched a 99.25 percent malware detection rate, higher than the overall average rate of 96.14 percent in July 2011 certification testing, ahead of Kaspersky's May score of 98.5 percent and just behind Bitdefender's 99.53 percent. However, Titanium was able to remove only 64.5 percent of active malware infections, way below the industry average of 80.7 percent. The rootkit detection and removal rate was average, with 90 percent detected and 70 percent removed. In AV-Test.org's zero-day attacks test, Kaspersky blocked 92.9 percent of the attacks, compared with the average July 2011 certification results of 85.7 percent. The suite also did not generate any false positives.
So, in short, AV-Test.org found Trend Micro Titanium 2011 and the new 2012 to be effective but not among the best of the best.
The most recent AV-Comparatives.org Whole Product test, which looks at on-demand scanning, retroactive tests, and "real-world" guards including cloud-based protections, puts Trend Micro 2011 in the top six suites tested. The June 2011 test found that it blocked 99.3 percent of attacks and threats thrown at it, only behind F-Secure and Panda. Meanwhile, looking at Whole Product test results cumulatively from January to June 2011 Trend Micro 2011 came in sixth, blocking 98.6 percent of threats.
A third testing lab, Dennis Technology Labs, found Trend Micro Titanium 2011 to be the one of the best suites it tested. Dennis Labs placed Titanium second out of 11 suites tested, with a Total Accuracy score of 142 out of 150--just behind Norton 2011. However, this test was conducted in January 2011.
It's fair to conclude that according to third-party tests, Titanium has been effective over the past year, but not remarkably so. However, because of weak malware removal scores, an enormous impact on boot time, and not getting the highest scores on the detection and prevention tests, we'd like to see better from Trend Micro in the future.
Conclusion
Trend Micro leaped forward and took a risk in 2011. It didn't for the 2012 suites, but it didn't have to. Instead, 2012 sees a solid upgrade, with some clever new offerings. What holds back Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security are its benchmarks. The lackluster threat removal scores don't stand up against the more well-rounded competition, and the abysmal boot-time impact must be improved. If Titanium can polish those areas, then that would be showing some mettle we could really get behind.

  FOR AVIRA INTERNET SECUIRTY ANTIVIRUS DOWNLOAD

                   

 

 Get Avira Internet Security 2012, then relax. Your computer and your privacy are in the best of hands. Choose Avira Internet Security 2012 if you: -Regularly look up information on the web; -Access your bank accounts or investments online; -Shop in online stores or place bids at auction sites; -Make online phone calls, instant message or social network; -Use public wifi networks; -Share your computer with your partner or family members; -Store your irreplaceable photos, music and videos on your PC; -Are concerned about what your children might see and do online.;

Advantages: Detection: -System Scanner detects the latest known viruses, worms and Trojans fast. -AntiSpam filters out unwanted and phishing emails. -AntiBot blocks hackers' attempts to take over your computer. -AntiPhishing protects you against identity theft attacks. -AntiAd/Spyware shuts out online spies and annoying pop-ups. -Rootkit Protection keeps you safe from hidden malware that conventional antivirus can't find. Prevention: -Real-Time Protection prevents infection from viruses, worms and Trojans. -FireWall adds an extra layer of defense against intrusions. -ProActive halts undiscovered threats by tracking their behavior. -AHeAD Technology inspects unfamiliar code for suspicious signs. -Web Protection stops you from landing on malicious websites. -AntiDrive-by blocks unwanted software downloads while you surf. -Mail Protection keeps infected emails at a safe distance from your inbox. Repair: -Quick Removal eliminates viruses in one click. -Generic Repair removes all traces of infection automatically. -Backup System lets you recover your data in case of an accident, infection or theft. -Rescue System jumpstarts your PC in an emergency. Extra benefits: -Express Installation configures perfectly tuned security in a few clicks. -Netbook Support works fast on low resolution, low memory laptops -Live Support provides interactive help from an Avira expert. -Game Mode suspends unnecessary alerts during games and movies. -Child Protection makes it easy to monitor your children's internet use

FOR AVAST INTERNET SECURITY DOWNLOAD

 

 

The bottom line: Avast continues to push the envelope of top-shelf free security features with hybrid update tech, file reputation analysis, and more. It's independent benchmarks are a bit weak, but more than 150 million people trust Avast to keep them safe.
Review:
Looking to compete with both paid and free security suites, Avast wants to create a unified approach to your computer security. Long gone are the days of the quirky interface. Avast is accessible and robust, with an impressive list of free features and strong, though hardly stellar, performance benchmarks.

Installation
Avast has improved its installation process so it's faster than before. It's not the fastest on the market, not by a longshot, but a standard installation took us about three minutes.
Some items of note during the installation that will come up later in the review: to avoid the new Windows 7 and Vista desktop gadget, or the new WebRep browser add-on, you must choose the Custom install option and uncheck those here.
Automatic installation of these features is frowned upon, although Avast does provide a clear method for uninstalling them. It's just not as simple as a check box that gets its own installation window, since you have to go through the Customize menu, which makes the auto-install sort of surreptitious.
The current versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer both block forced add-on installation. When you run one of those browsers for the first time after installing Avast, they'll ask you if you want to allow the new add-on.
On the plus side, installing Avast doesn't require a reboot, and using its uninstall tool we detected no remnants in the Registry or on the desktop. Avast has said that the installer has shrunk for all three versions by about 20 percent, although it's still a large download at around 70MB for the free version.
A new Avast installation option, available only from the custom install menu, lets you sideload Avast as a secondary security program to supplement your main one. We're not big fans of this option from a security point-of-view, because it can bog down your system resources without actually making you safer. However, for seeing if you like Avast, it's not a bad thing as long as you remember to choose one security suite to go with.

Interface
Avast 7's interface hasn't changed much over the past three versions. There've been some decorative changes, a darkening of color here, lightening of grays there, but the changes have been either lightly cosmetic or utilitarian. For example, there are big graphics to illustrate the more nebulous security concepts that only have an on-or-off switch. This may sound useless, but it's actually quite clever because it helps you visualize how one of the more complex Avast features is keeping you safe without bogging you down in jargon.
Highlighted with the familiar security colors of green for safe and red for dangerous, the Summary tab gives up-to-date info on shield status, auto-updates, virus definitions, the program version, and whether the silent/gaming mode is on. There's also an unobtrusive ad urging you to upgrade to Avast Internet Security 7 if you're using the free version, and an option to connect an Avast account. (This is for the Avast Web management tool, expected to be live about a month from when this review is published.)
The Summary tab contains two submenus, Cloud Services and Statistics. The former shows you how Avast's servers help protect you, and offers a Settings button.
The latter is for those intrepid folks who're curious to see how Avast's shields have been performing against threats. It's where you can get your math geek on. For each shield, it tells you how many files were scanned and when, and presents the data in a concise graph.

Avast 2012 includes a hybrid update technology for pushing out security updates to you faster.

(Credit: Avast)

The scans live in the second tab, where you can choose and adjust four default scan types plus a custom scan option nestled into the bottom right corner. Real-time shields live in the third tab, and again the clean interface comes into play here as navigating what could be a mess of options and tweaks is instead dead simple. Shields are listed on the left, or you can choose one from the interactive shield wheel in the main window.
Click a shield to reveal a real-time chart of what the program's been defending you against, with a Stop button and settings options at the top of the window. Another button at the top takes you to the advanced settings for that shield, and links at the bottom expose the shield's history as a graph and export a log file.
The Additional Protection tab leads to the AutoSandbox, Browser Protection, Remote Assistance, and Site Blocking tools. Avast Pro Antivirus and Avast Internet Security users also get Antispam, Sandbox, and SafeZone options. The Maintenance and Market tabs round out the options. As you might expect, Maintenance is for updating the program, checking out quarantine (called Virus Chest,) and managing your subscription, while the Market tab is a new option for buying extra security components.
Features and support
While these tools are clearly non-essential, and some of the prices struck as high--$10 for a Rescue disc? $50 for an annual backup service?--we like that Avast gives its fans a chance to stay in its eco-system. The Avast EasyPass, for example, is an Avast-branded version of RoboForm's premium password manager and is well worth the $9.99 annual fee.
Avast 2012, aka Avast 7, includes several new features that directly impact your security. One of the biggest changes is a hybrid update technology that pushes out updates in real time. Because a full database update isn't required, Avast users will get their security updates much faster than before. Full database updates will also be pushed out, just not as frequently.
Another important security change introduces a file reputation system for evaluating downloads. This tech has existed for a couple of years in paid security suites like Norton, Kaspersky, and Bitdefender, but Avast is the first free antivirus to offer it. It leverages community data from Avast's enormous active user base to help determine if a file is safe.
Avast's WebRep browser add-on for instant Web site safety evaluation has been extended to work with Safari, and it will also now check for fake certificates. Faked security certificates were an unexpected problem last year, demonstrating how fragile Web security protocol could be.
In a half-day of testing, none of these appeared to cause any negative impact on computer or browsing performance. Assuming these technologies work as advertised, your computer ought to be a fair bit safer from malware with them.
And although we're more than half a year away from Windows 8, Avast has included some attention for the forthcoming Windows 8 beta, also known as the Consumer Preview, gets some attention from Avast as the suite includes an Early-Load Antimalware Driver (ELAM) for guarding against system-level rootkits.

Avast's browser add-on now works in Safari (not pictured), and paid users can force their browsers to always run sandboxed from a single checkbox.

(Credit: Avast)

The free version of Avast is arguably the most comprehensive set of freely available security features on the market. There's a reason these guys have more than 150 million active users (at the time this review was written). The antivirus, antispyware, and heuristics engines form a security core that also includes multiple real-time shields. Along with the new features, it's got an AutoSandbox for automatically walling off suspicious programs; a full complement of shields that guard against scripts, P2P networks, instant messaging, and potentially dangerous program behavior; a silent/gaming mode; on-demand boot scanning; and a healthy output of statistics for the data nerds.
Avast's sandbox, by the way, automatically places programs in a virtualized state when it suspects them of being threats. It walls off suspicious programs, preventing them from potentially damaging your system while allowing them to run. As the program runs, the sandbox keeps track of which files are opened, created, or renamed, and what it reads and writes from the Registry. Permanent changes are virtualized, so when the process terminates itself, the system changes it made will evaporate.
The company hasn't said whether the virtualized state begins after the program already has access to your system, so it's theoretically possible that it could be compromised. There's not a single security feature in any program that hasn't been been compromised at some point, though, so "theoretically hackable" is true of all security features. The AutoSandbox will now advise you when you're done using it as to how best to handle the program in the future.
The AutoSandbox for free users is different from Avast's paid-upgrade sandbox, and the paid upgrades to Avast Pro and Avast Internet Security include both the automatic version and the older, manually initiated version.
You can access the AutoSandbox settings from the new Additional Protection option on the left nav. It defaults to asking the user whether a program should be sandboxed, although you can set it to automatically decide. There's a whitelist option for programs that you always want to exclude from the sandbox, or you can deactivate the feature entirely.
In addition to these core security features, Avast has some nifty extras to help you out. The Troubleshooting section now comes with a "restore factory settings" option, which makes it easier to wipe settings back to a familiar starting point, and comes with the option to restore only the Shields settings, leaving other changes untouched, like permanently running in silent mode.
There's a sidebar desktop gadget for Windows 7 and Vista, and you can set automatic actions for the boot-time scan. Available under the Scan Computer tab, the boot-time scan customizations give you far more flexibility in managing the lengthy and time-consuming boot scan.
Meanwhile, new in Avast Free is the Remote Assistance feature, for single-instance, friend-to-friend remote tech support. Part of the main Avast interface, all the other person has to have is...Avast.
It's a good way to get others to install the program, but this isn't the only single-serving tech support option around. Still, in our tests, it worked fine. One person shares a code with the other, and voila! Instant remote PC access. Simply close the window to break the connection.
Avast doesn't offer an on-demand link-scanning feature, like AVG and Norton do, although the company says that the way that Avast's Web shield behaves ought to protect you automatically from any malicious URLs by automatically preventing the URL from resolving in-browser. A page will appear letting you know that Avast has blocked the site because it is suspected to contain a threat.
There weren't many big changes for Avast Pro Antivirus or Avast Internet Security users, but there were improvements made to the Safe Zone and Browser Sandbox features. The Browser Sandbox now lets you force Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, or Safari to always run sandboxed away from your system. SafeZone now automatically asks you when you're about to perform a browser-based financial transaction if you'd like to switch to the SafeZone mode.
Performance
As far as Avast's impact on system performance goes, in a real-world test Avast completed its scans in a timely yet not blazingly fast manner. A Quick Scan took about 20 minutes, and the Full Scan took 59 minutes. RAM usage was surprisingly light, with Avast only eating up about 16MB when running a scan.
CNET Labs determined that Avast has a fairly light touch on your computer's performance. Avast Free 2012 scored well below the average impact on startup time, and had the least impact of all suites tested on your PC's shutdown time. Scans were faster than average, beating big names like Norton, Kaspersky, and Bitdefender, a tad slower than AVG, but not as fast as Trend Micro or Webroot.

Security Program	Boot time	Shutdown time	Scan time	MS Office performance	iTunes decoding	Media multitasking	Cinebench
Unprotected system	40	6	n/a	395	120	342	17,711
Average of all tested systems (to date)	67.4	16.2	1,058	414	125	347	17,129
Avast Free Antivirus 2012	55.2	9.6	800	412	126	347	16,976
Avast Pro Antivirus 2012	69.8	11.3	732	402	126	343	17,148
Avast Internet Security 2012	63.6	12.2	831	407	125	346	17,060

*All tests measured in seconds, except for Cinebench. On the Cinebench test, the higher number is better.
Avast performed better than average on the MS Office test, around average on iTunes Decoding and Media Multitasking, and a bit worse than average in our Cinebench test. On the key end-user experiences of its impact on your startup and shutdown times, and scan time performance, Avast won't make you want to walk a plank out of frustration.
All the security features in the world do you no good if they don't keep you safe, and on that count Avast performs well in general. However, as results from independent efficacy testing groups indicate, Avast could've had a better 2011.
AV-Test.org gave the previous version of Avast a passing rating in its most recent test, on a Windows 7 computer from December 2011. Avast 6 barely passed with the minimum passing score of 11 out of 18. It reached 4 out of 6 in Protection, 3.0 out of 6 in Repair, and a 5 out of 6 in Usability, for a total of 12. Usability includes testing for false positives, which Avast suffered on.
AV-Comparatives.org also saw room for improvement in Avast during November 2011. The suite blocked only 93.6 percent of threats tested during that month, which could then be kicked up to a more respectable 95.9 percent with some settings tweaks by the user. Looking at January 2011 to November 2011, Avast did much better, blocking 95.6 percent outright and bumping to 97.5 percent with adjusted settings.
As far as certification goes, Avast received the Advanced+ certification from AV-Comparatives for the first half of 2011, but only Standard certification in the second half. Right now, we doubt that this is going to cause much consternation among Avast fans, but a full year of weak scores could smite the ardor of even the most enthusiastic fan.
Judging from these results, Avast has to make some changes to its detection rates quickly to convince people that its strong feature set is worth it.
Conclusion
When it comes to your security, Avast 2012 gets a lot right. It's got a usable, uncluttered interface, solid although not stellar benchmarks, and a set of features that keeps it at the forefront of Windows security.
It's true that the changes to the suite better improve its performance in efficacy tests or there could be serious problems, but for now we've got three key reasons for enthusiastically recommending Avast Antivirus Free 2012 as an Editors' Choice for free security suite. First, it's got the most aggressively forward-thinking feature set of the free suites. Second, it's very good at protecting you. It's not the best at it, but it does what it does well, and that leads to the third reason it's earned its award: it protects you without dragging your PC into the mud. Few people want security that makes a good machine run like an old one, and on that count, Avast has your back.

FOR KASPERSKY INTERNET SECUIRTY DOWNLOAD

The 2013 updates to the Kaspersky protection suites bring to consumers some of the most advanced security technology currently available. It involves introducing an exploit prevention engine as part of the security suite, but also a Safe Money banking protection tool that you can interact directly with. The suite's scans aren't the fastest, but it definitely will protect you.
Installation

Installing Kaspersky has been dramatically simplified over the past two years. Following on 2012's fuss-free install, the installer for 2013 will remove conflicting security programs and any detected malware automatically.
You're still on the hook for a reboot, but not when running only the trial. The install procedure was only three screens long, and it took under 2 minutes to complete. You can also register and purchase a license key from the program itself, no need to jump to your browser. Overall, this is one of the best installation processes for a security suite, if by best you mean, "short, fast, and painless."
Interface

Kaspersky's followed up last year's overhauled interface with only minor tweaks this year to accommodate new features. The number of windows you must go through to initiate a scan, or to solve a problem warning, has been reduced.
Based on a mobile app-drawer design, the interface presents your security status at the top and stashes the four major security features of scanning, updating, the new Safe Money, and parental controls, at the bottom. The app drawer layout puts key security status information up front, and keeps your tools organized yet easily accessible below. You can slide the features sideways to see more options, or click the arrow at the bottom to pull up, drawer-style, the full list of options. Settings and Reports live in the upper right corner, and both use terminology repeated throughout the interface. This creates a solid level of consistency, and ought to appeal to basic security consumers and power users alike.
A Cloud Protection button at the top of the interface opens a screen that explains Kaspersky's cloud technology that debuted in the 2012 version. Like its competitors that have already incorporated cloud-based detection, you can opt out of anonymously contributing your data without making yourself less safe.
Kaspersky's opt-out is a bit tricky to get to, though. Hit Settings, the annoyingly unlabeled Advanced Settings tab (hint: it's the cardboard box), Feedback, and then uncheck the box to opt out.
Unlike some competitors, which allow you to reorder the tool buttons so you can have the ones you use most often at the ready, Kaspersky's tool layout is locked down. This is one of the few drawbacks to the design. Another is that in the Settings window, the tabs on the left are unlabeled and their icons are not necessarily as obvious to understand as possible. In order, they are Protection Center, Scan, Update, and Advanced Settings.
Labeling aside, the settings themselves were remarkably easy to navigate and comprehend -- even the advanced ones. Meanwhile, jumping from feature to feature was a zippy experience, and we encountered absolutely no lag when skipping between screens.
Features and support

Kaspersky 2013's newest and best features come in the form of some very forward-thinking security improvements.
The most important of them is the exploit blocking engine called Automatic Exploit Prevention. It's a response to the increase in the number of phishing attacks and includes an antiphishing engine -- similar to the antivirus and anti-malware engines -- that updates daily.
It's hard to overstate how critical stopping exploits can be to stopping large-quantity cash thefts from online banks. Experts have estimated recent successful banking breaches at scoring from $3 million to more than $220 million, and Kaspersky says that the exploit prevention engine stops the vast majority of exploit kits.
A major component of the exploit prevention engine is Address Space Layout Randomization, or ASLR. It's a proven security technology, used in Apple OS X and iOS, in Google's Android, and by Microsoft in Windows 8. It's not foolproof, but it is one of the more effective security technologies currently available. The inclusion of ASLR in Kaspersky means that the technology will be available to Windows 7 and earlier versions, making Kaspersky unique in the security realm for that reason.
The suite now blocks Duqu and other malware specifically designed to surreptitiously install on your computer before the antivirus program loads during boot.
Safe Money revamps the Safe Run feature from previous years and is only in Kaspersky Internet Security 2013, not Kaspersky Anti-Virus. It basically streamlines the process of accessing banking sites securely. Simply go to your banking site, and as long as you have Kaspersky's browser add-ons installed, it will ask you if you want to open the site in a sandboxed mode, isolated from other browser and PC processes. You can also manually add other sites to Safe Money in Kaspersky's interface, but it's no longer a requirement because of Safe Money's new auto-detection. You can tell it's running because of a thin green line around your browser window.
We were skeptical about Safe Money working as advertised, but it really does detect banking Web sites as you visit them and reopen them in sandboxed browsers. It detected both major banks like Chase, and our own local credit union's site without fail.
Other changes have been made, as well. The secure keyboard for protecting personal data when entered by a physical keyboard works with more sites than before; there is expanded browser compatibility so it now works with Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Opera; and better battery management has been implemented for laptops. (We did not test the battery life, however, due to time constraints.)
There are older features worth calling out, too. One is the File Advisor, which is a Windows Explorer context menu option for checking out a file's reputation without having to go through the main Kaspersky program itself. It creates a pipeline from the Kaspersky Security Network, the Kaspersky cloud protection, to the files on your desktop. We found it to pull down reputation data quickly, although its speed also depends on your Internet connection.
The Roll Back feature can easily undo damage caused by any malware that does slip through, and the Network Monitor feature shows you real-time traffic to and from your computer. Among the better ancillary tools are an Internet Explorer security analyzer, which is a good idea if you're stuck on Windows XP with IE8 or earlier -- but it's weird that it doesn't support any other browsers.
The virtual keyboard, different from the physical keyboard protection, has been improved so that it's more responsive than previously. It's mostly an older feature to use if you're worried about keyloggers that Kaspersky keeps around for bragging rights. It's highly unlikely that you'd have Kaspersky running and be infected by a keylogger.
Unchanged from last year, online support is decent, with the standard offerings of forums, live chat, knowledge base articles, and telephone support. Live chat isn't as robust as with some competitors, only available from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern time, Monday through Friday. The telephone support is similarly restricted from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., Eastern time, Monday through Friday. The tech-support number is buried fairly deep on the Kaspersky site, probably to discourage calls. They can be reached at 781-503-1820 or 1-866-525-9094.
Performance

Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 (KIS) shares the same detection engine as its less feature-laden sibling, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012 (KAV), so both are discussed here.
Kaspersky historically doesn't focus on speedy scans as much as its competitors. For most of the scan's duration on a real-world computer, it promised to complete in less than 3 minutes, when in reality it took an average of 8 minutes, 10 seconds to complete over three runs. Meanwhile, the Full scan tightened up and completed scanning in 1 hour, 32 minutes -- that's about average for Full scans. The Rootkit scan took an average of 8 minutes, 32 seconds.
CNET Labs' benchmarks bear out these findings. The in-lab scan time for KIS took 1,286 seconds (just under 22 minutes), faster than last year's 1,320 seconds and yet one of the slower scan we've seen this year. KAV took 1,227 seconds, also faster than last year's and still one of the slower scans this year.
The Lab found Kaspersky to nearly perfectly mirror last year's results. Boot-time impact was atrocious, with KIS slowing down boot by 47.3 seconds and KAV adding 68.3 seconds. Shutdown impact was much better, with KIS adding only 6.3 seconds and KAV adding a stunningly small 4.5 seconds. On MS Office, iTunes decoding, media multitasking tests, and Cinebench, the two suites were around average. However, Kaspersky feels light when in use, and it transitioned smoothly among its different features and when jumping to other programs.
We did notice some rare, temporary browser hangs, most likely because of the multiple Kaspersky add-ons.

Security program	Boot time	Shutdown time	Scan time	MS Office performance	iTunes decoding	Media multitasking	Cinebench
Unprotected system	40	6	n/a	395	120	342	17,711
Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2013	108.3	10.5	1,227	432	125	345	17,038
Kaspersky Internet Security 2013	87.3	12.3	1,286	429	124	343	17,128

Note: All tests measured in seconds, except for Cinebench. On the Cinebench test, higher numbers are better.
As far as threat detection and removal go, there are no numbers available yet for Kaspersky 2013. But the most recent tests with Kaspersky 2012 show that the Russians know a thing or two about keeping your computer safe. Independent testing agency AV-Test.org has marked consistently high scores for Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 during the first two quarters of 2012.
On a Windows 7 computer, Kaspersky scored 5.5 out of 6 on Protection, 6 out of 6 on Repair, and 5 out of 6 on Usability, for an overall score of 16.5 out of 18, clearing the minimum of 11 for an AV-Test.org certificate. This is a marked improvement from a total score of 14 last year at this time.
Note that AV-Test.org defines its categories as follows: "The 'Protection' covers static and dynamic malware detection, including real-world zero-day attack testing. In case of 'Repair,' we check the system disinfection and rootkit removal in detail. The 'Usability' testing includes the system slowdown caused by the tools and the number of false positives."
The most recent AV-Comparatives.org Whole Product test, which looks at on-demand scanning, retroactive tests, and "real-world" guards including cloud-based protections, puts Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 in the top three suites tested from January to May, 2012, and in the top five suites of May 2012.
The May 2012 test found that it blocked 99.1 percent of attacks and threats thrown at it, an improvement from 98.3 percent last year at this time. Meanwhile, looking at Whole Product test results cumulatively from January 2012 to May 2012 found that Kaspersky 2012 blocking 99.3 percent of threats, and could be 0.1 percent safer depending on user adjustments.
It's fair to conclude that according to third-party tests, Kaspersky has been highly effective over the past year since two out of the three tests we looked at gave it solid marks. Kaspersky has definitely improved its protection rates over the past year, but it still could do better when it comes to its impact on your system.
Conclusions
Kaspersky's 2013 suites pack a lot in, but aside from the way they will cause some performance lags on your computer, there's one other drawback to them. These are not cheap pieces of software. Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2013 will set you back $59.95, and Internet Security 2013 retails for $79.95. Those are steep prices to demand, especially when the free suites offer similar protection. Kaspersky's hard sell comes from the smooth-functioning advanced security it offers, even at the Anti-Virus, fewer-featured level. Offering the exploit protection in the entry-level suite shows that Kaspersky places your safety above the upsell -- otherwise it'd only be in the Internet Security suite. Both will protect you, but unless you want the parental controls or the Safe Money features, we lean toward Kaspersky Anti-Virus.

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The bottom line: Low-impact performance, strong security, and useful features are the hallmarks of Norton Internet Security 2012, one of the best security suites available.
Review:
Over the past few years, Symantec has completed a course reversal for its Norton consumer Internet security suites. The massive package of security tools works better than it ever has before, with an impressive set of features, some useful new tools including remote management and download stability analysis, and third-party security efficacy benchmarks that are at the top of the heap. Meanwhile, CNET Labs' performance benchmarks indicate that though Norton doesn't leave the smallest footprint on your system, users should see a minimal impact overall.

Installation
For the third year in a row, Norton's formerly sluggish beast now offers a smooth and fast installation operation. Once you run the installer, the program is ready to operate in about a minute--impressively fast, and doubly so considering past performance. The installation process is also the first time that you will interact with Quorum, Norton's behavior-based detection engine. You'll be asked to participate by sending anonymous data to Symantec's cloud. Opting out of the data submission, according to Symantec, will not affect your security.
Running the trial of Norton also requires registering the program. Like many programs, Norton used to force open your default browser and take you to the company's registration Web site. Now you can register from within the program. Uninstalling the software left about 10 Registry entries behind, but no other traces were detectable. Overall, Norton's installation experience was fast and hassle-free, with a minimum of configuration options--but the ones that did come up appeared necessary.
Interface
Norton Internet Security 2012 contains some changes to the 2011 interface, although the design is heavily reminiscent of the previous version. It keeps the dark theme, punctuated by yellow text, and the contrast works well. Changes this year include a reorganized and streamlined Settings interface; a "pinnable" Advanced screen--so that power users can get about their business faster--which also comes with a CPU gauge; and tweaks to the System Status indicator. This year, the interface feels more balanced between the feature display and empty space.
The simplified layout offers Scans on the left, Updates in the center, and Advanced tools on the right. Clicking on one reveals controls specific to that area of protection. At the bottom of the interface is a wide, short map of the world covered with blinking yellow dots. Each one, according to Symantec, represents a threat to one of its users that has been successfully blocked. The Activity Map visual is cute, but completely irrelevant to your personal safety. More interesting is that below the map there are a series of mobile app-style buttons. From there you can access the new Norton Management, Norton Mobile, Norton Online Family, Norton Safe Web, and Norton Backup without having to jump to your browser.
Features and support
There aren't many new features in Norton Internet Security 2012, but what's new ought to appeal to the kind of person who wants the souped-up security in this robust suite.
There's now a link at the bottom of the main interface to Norton's mobile version. Next to it is a link for Norton Management, a new tool that opens in your default Web browser that allows you to use Norton remotely. This includes monitoring security status, remote add and installation, and license key renewal. However, given the growth of the mobile market, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect a stronger connection between the two in the coming year.
One of the better new features is a change to Download Insight. This community-driven tool originally evaluated files being downloaded for security, but now it looks at their stability for other Norton users, too. There are also metered bandwidth options for people on rate-limited connections, and several interface tweaks to make the program easier on the eyes and to make it easier to find things.
The port of Norton 360's startup manager was an excellent call. If you're Windows-savvy, you're probably comfortable managing that stuff by hand, but even for those in the know, the Norton version makes startup changes easier to implement. Along with pulling in community ratings, you can toggle a process on or off, or delay it.
The Identity Safe has been improved, too. It now includes LastPass-styled password handling and cloud-based syncing and vaults, features that some competitors have had for a while. Google Chrome finally gets Safe Web support from Norton, but it's surprisingly not in Norton AntiVirus. While I understand the point of value-added features, this one seems an unnecessarily restrictive hit on users of the fastest-growing browser.
The reputation-based security checks where your programs were installed from and when they were installed, and compares that against data from the 58 million users participating in the crowd-sourced Norton Community Watch to see if any of your programs should be red-flagged. Norton's System Insight component has been bumped up to version 2.0; System Insight is the proprietary internal network that warns you when your programs unnecessarily hog system resources. This gives some extra heft to the system performance map, where you can click on any spike and see what caused it.
The third iteration of Download Insight applies the same reputation-based logic to new downloads, and the fourth version of Norton SONAR (Symantec Online Network for Automatic Response) looks for suspicious software behavior and automatically chooses protective actions. You can toggle how aggressive SONAR is in the Settings window.
Along with the quick scan, the full-system scan, and the custom scan for viruses and malware, you can now have Norton scan your Facebook wall for malicious links. There are also on-demand reputation-based quick scans, full scans, and custom scans for users who want Norton to immediately scan their installed programs. After completing a scan, Norton provides users with a summary report. More-detailed information, including scan duration and a deeper dive into threats discovered, can be read under the History option from the main window. There's also a link that you can follow in case you believe that Norton missed something in its scan, although as reputation-based protection matures, on-demand scanning becomes less of an issue when compared with the "always-on" protection offered here.
The bootable recovery tool isn't new, but it now comes with a feature that automatically creates a CD, DVD, or USB-based bootable device. The USB component is especially important on optical-drive-free systems such as Netbooks.
Norton continues to dabble in free security offerings, including the Norton Online Family parental controls, the "lite" version of Norton Safe Web, and the new Norton Power Eraser. Power Eraser is a new tool that will aggressively clean your computer of fake antivirus programs and other malware that prevents legitimate security tools from being installed.
As with the rest of the program, the support options have been streamlined behind a drop-down menu in the top right of the interface. Help opens local support, Tutorials leads to a Web site with extensive how-tos, and the Get Support link accesses the breadth of Norton's customer support in a new window. Here, users can chat with tech support 24-7, explore the user manual, and check out the Norton FAQ and knowledge base. Phone support is also available, although Symantec takes part in the trend to make phone support harder to access by funneling users to online resources.
Performance
Norton's fast installation and comprehensive feature set would be useless without solid performance, and Norton Internet Security 2012 delivers extremely high third-party efficacy benchmarks and strong performance benchmarks.
In a real-world test, Norton 2012 completed a Quick Scan in 2 minutes, 43 seconds; the Full Scan took 1 hour 43 minutes and 54 seconds. While the Full Scan average is comparable to last year's, the Quick Scan was approximately 1 minute and 30 seconds slower than last year's average.
CNET Labs' benchmarks found both Norton Internet Security 2012 and Norton AntiVirus 2012 to have performed well, although not as strongly as some of their competitors. Note that we can't directly compare this year's results with last year's because we upgraded our testing computer from Windows 7 x64 to Windows 7 x64 with Service Pack 1.
NIS 2012 slowed down the Labs' computer boot time by about 11.8 seconds, one of the fastest scores this year, whereas NAV 2012 added an unimpressive 21.2 seconds. This is in line with previous years, which saw NIS do better on boot than NAV.
Both had a very small impact on the computer's shutdown time, slowing it down only by about 4 seconds compared with an unprotected computer. Scan times for both were disappointingly average in the Labs; in previous years, they were aggressively competitive. However, our in-use system performance tests, the iTunes decoding, Microsoft Office, media multitasking, and Cinebench tests, showed both Norton suites having a low-level impact on our test computer. This means that, all things being equal, you're not going to notice much when Norton is running as you go about your computing business.

Security program	Boot time	Shutdown time	Scan time	MS Office performance	iTunes decoding	Media multitasking	Cinebench
Unprotected system	40	6	n/a	395	120	342	17,711
Average of all tested systems (to date)	63.0	15.8	1,136	416	125	348	17,112
Norton AntiVirus 2012	61.2	9.9	1,154	403	125	344	17,007
Norton Internet Security 2012	51.8	10.3	1,066	410	123	343	17,386

*All tests measured in seconds, except for Cinebench. On the Cinebench test, the higher number is better.
In independent threat detection and removal tests, Norton is a top performer. In the AV-Test.org test on Windows 7 from the first quarter of 2011, Norton Internet Security 2011 scored 15 out of 18 overall, one of the better suites tested. The suite had a 5.5 rating out of 6 in Protection, a 5.0 in Repair, and a 4.5 in Usability.
The second-quarter 2011 test, on a Windows XP computer, definitely showed improvement in some areas and regression in others. It scored 13.5 out of 18 overall, a solid midrange score. The suite improved in Protection and Repair with a 5.0 rating out of 6 for both, but Usability dropped to 3.5 most likely due to false positives.
Third-quarter results aren't in yet, but results shared by AV-Test.org with CNET indicate that the suite continues to perform well. It notched a 98.94 percent malware detection rate, higher than the overall average rate of 97.31 percent in August 2011 certification testing, but not as high as some competitors, such as Bitdefender. The suite was able to remove 83.3 percent of active malware infections, only slightly higher than the industry average of 80 percent. In AV-Test.org's zero-day attacks test, Bitdefender blocked 100 percent of the attacks, compared with the average August 2011 certification results of 92.16 percent. The suite also did not find any false positives.
The most recent AV-Comparatives.org Whole Product test, which looks at on-demand scanning, retroactive tests, and "real-world" guards including cloud-based protections, puts Norton Internet Security 2011 toward the front of the class, out of 17 suites tested. Looking at Whole Product test results cumulatively from January 2011 to June 2011 found that AVG came in 13th, blocking 99.1 percent of threats.

Installation
For the third year in a row, Norton's formerly sluggish beast now offers a smooth and fast installation operation. Once you run the installer, the program is ready to operate in about a minute--impressively fast, and doubly so considering past performance. The installation process is also the first time that you will interact with Quorum, Norton's behavior-based detection engine. You'll be asked to participate by sending anonymous data to Symantec's cloud. Opting out of the data submission, according to Symantec, will not affect your security.
Running the trial of Norton also requires registering the program. Like many programs, Norton used to force open your default browser and take you to the company's registration Web site. Now you can register from within the program. Uninstalling the software left about 10 Registry entries behind, but no other traces were detectable. Overall, Norton's installation experience was fast and hassle-free, with a minimum of configuration options--but the ones that did come up appeared necessary.
Interface
Norton Internet Security 2012 contains some changes to the 2011 interface, although the design is heavily reminiscent of the previous version. It keeps the dark theme, punctuated by yellow text, and the contrast works well. Changes this year include a reorganized and streamlined Settings interface; a "pinnable" Advanced screen--so that power users can get about their business faster--which also comes with a CPU gauge; and tweaks to the System Status indicator. This year, the interface feels more balanced between the feature display and empty space.
The simplified layout offers Scans on the left, Updates in the center, and Advanced tools on the right. Clicking on one reveals controls specific to that area of protection. At the bottom of the interface is a wide, short map of the world covered with blinking yellow dots. Each one, according to Symantec, represents a threat to one of its users that has been successfully blocked. The Activity Map visual is cute, but completely irrelevant to your personal safety. More interesting is that below the map there are a series of mobile app-style buttons. From there you can access the new Norton Management, Norton Mobile, Norton Online Family, Norton Safe Web, and Norton Backup without having to jump to your browser.
Features and support
There aren't many new features in Norton Internet Security 2012, but what's new ought to appeal to the kind of person who wants the souped-up security in this robust suite.
There's now a link at the bottom of the main interface to Norton's mobile version. Next to it is a link for Norton Management, a new tool that opens in your default Web browser that allows you to use Norton remotely. This includes monitoring security status, remote add and installation, and license key renewal. However, given the growth of the mobile market, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect a stronger connection between the two in the coming year.
One of the better new features is a change to Download Insight. This community-driven tool originally evaluated files being downloaded for security, but now it looks at their stability for other Norton users, too. There are also metered bandwidth options for people on rate-limited connections, and several interface tweaks to make the program easier on the eyes and to make it easier to find things.
The port of Norton 360's startup manager was an excellent call. If you're Windows-savvy, you're probably comfortable managing that stuff by hand, but even for those in the know, the Norton version makes startup changes easier to implement. Along with pulling in community ratings, you can toggle a process on or off, or delay it.
The Identity Safe has been improved, too. It now includes LastPass-styled password handling and cloud-based syncing and vaults, features that some competitors have had for a while. Google Chrome finally gets Safe Web support from Norton, but it's surprisingly not in Norton AntiVirus. While I understand the point of value-added features, this one seems an unnecessarily restrictive hit on users of the fastest-growing browser.
The reputation-based security checks where your programs were installed from and when they were installed, and compares that against data from the 58 million users participating in the crowd-sourced Norton Community Watch to see if any of your programs should be red-flagged. Norton's System Insight component has been bumped up to version 2.0; System Insight is the proprietary internal network that warns you when your programs unnecessarily hog system resources. This gives some extra heft to the system performance map, where you can click on any spike and see what caused it.
The third iteration of Download Insight applies the same reputation-based logic to new downloads, and the fourth version of Norton SONAR (Symantec Online Network for Automatic Response) looks for suspicious software behavior and automatically chooses protective actions. You can toggle how aggressive SONAR is in the Settings window.
Along with the quick scan, the full-system scan, and the custom scan for viruses and malware, you can now have Norton scan your Facebook wall for malicious links. There are also on-demand reputation-based quick scans, full scans, and custom scans for users who want Norton to immediately scan their installed programs. After completing a scan, Norton provides users with a summary report. More-detailed information, including scan duration and a deeper dive into threats discovered, can be read under the History option from the main window. There's also a link that you can follow in case you believe that Norton missed something in its scan, although as reputation-based protection matures, on-demand scanning becomes less of an issue when compared with the "always-on" protection offered here.
The bootable recovery tool isn't new, but it now comes with a feature that automatically creates a CD, DVD, or USB-based bootable device. The USB component is especially important on optical-drive-free systems such as Netbooks.
Norton continues to dabble in free security offerings, including the Norton Online Family parental controls, the "lite" version of Norton Safe Web, and the new Norton Power Eraser. Power Eraser is a new tool that will aggressively clean your computer of fake antivirus programs and other malware that prevents legitimate security tools from being installed.
As with the rest of the program, the support options have been streamlined behind a drop-down menu in the top right of the interface. Help opens local support, Tutorials leads to a Web site with extensive how-tos, and the Get Support link accesses the breadth of Norton's customer support in a new window. Here, users can chat with tech support 24-7, explore the user manual, and check out the Norton FAQ and knowledge base. Phone support is also available, although Symantec takes part in the trend to make phone support harder to access by funneling users to online resources.
Performance
Norton's fast installation and comprehensive feature set would be useless without solid performance, and Norton Internet Security 2012 delivers extremely high third-party efficacy benchmarks and strong performance benchmarks.
In a real-world test, Norton 2012 completed a Quick Scan in 2 minutes, 43 seconds; the Full Scan took 1 hour 43 minutes and 54 seconds. While the Full Scan average is comparable to last year's, the Quick Scan was approximately 1 minute and 30 seconds slower than last year's average.
CNET Labs' benchmarks found both Norton Internet Security 2012 and Norton AntiVirus 2012 to have performed well, although not as strongly as some of their competitors. Note that we can't directly compare this year's results with last year's because we upgraded our testing computer from Windows 7 x64 to Windows 7 x64 with Service Pack 1.
NIS 2012 slowed down the Labs' computer boot time by about 11.8 seconds, one of the fastest scores this year, whereas NAV 2012 added an unimpressive 21.2 seconds. This is in line with previous years, which saw NIS do better on boot than NAV.
Both had a very small impact on the computer's shutdown time, slowing it down only by about 4 seconds compared with an unprotected computer. Scan times for both were disappointingly average in the Labs; in previous years, they were aggressively competitive. However, our in-use system performance tests, the iTunes decoding, Microsoft Office, media multitasking, and Cinebench tests, showed both Norton suites having a low-level impact on our test computer. This means that, all things being equal, you're not going to notice much when Norton is running as you go about your computing business.

Security program	Boot time	Shutdown time	Scan time	MS Office performance	iTunes decoding	Media multitasking	Cinebench
Unprotected system	40	6	n/a	395	120	342	17,711
Average of all tested systems (to date)	63.0	15.8	1,136	416	125	348	17,112
Norton AntiVirus 2012	61.2	9.9	1,154	403	125	344	17,007
Norton Internet Security 2012	51.8	10.3	1,066	410	123	343	17,386

*All tests measured in seconds, except for Cinebench. On the Cinebench test, the higher number is better.
In independent threat detection and removal tests, Norton is a top performer. In the AV-Test.org test on Windows 7 from the first quarter of 2011, Norton Internet Security 2011 scored 15 out of 18 overall, one of the better suites tested. The suite had a 5.5 rating out of 6 in Protection, a 5.0 in Repair, and a 4.5 in Usability.
The second-quarter 2011 test, on a Windows XP computer, definitely showed improvement in some areas and regression in others. It scored 13.5 out of 18 overall, a solid midrange score. The suite improved in Protection and Repair with a 5.0 rating out of 6 for both, but Usability dropped to 3.5 most likely due to false positives.
Third-quarter results aren't in yet, but results shared by AV-Test.org with CNET indicate that the suite continues to perform well. It notched a 98.94 percent malware detection rate, higher than the overall average rate of 97.31 percent in August 2011 certification testing, but not as high as some competitors, such as Bitdefender. The suite was able to remove 83.3 percent of active malware infections, only slightly higher than the industry average of 80 percent. In AV-Test.org's zero-day attacks test, Bitdefender blocked 100 percent of the attacks, compared with the average August 2011 certification results of 92.16 percent. The suite also did not find any false positives.
The most recent AV-Comparatives.org Whole Product test, which looks at on-demand scanning, retroactive tests, and "real-world" guards including cloud-based protections, puts Norton Internet Security 2011 toward the front of the class, out of 17 suites tested. Looking at Whole Product test results cumulatively from January 2011 to June 2011 found that AVG came in 13th, blocking 99.1 percent of threats.

 FOR TREND MICRO TITANIUM INTERNET SECUIRTY DOWNLOAD

 

 

The bottom line: Following on last year's big overhaul, Trend Micro makes a series of smaller changes to this year's Titanium security suites. Four differences make this version $10 cheaper than Titanium Maximum Security, but for many those will be must-haves.
Review:
Last year was a headliner for Trend Micro's security suites. Overhauled with a lightweight interface and cloud-based detection, and rebranded as Trend Micro Titanium, the changes made the suite competitive again. The 2012 version builds on those improvements, so this year doesn't have a lot of big changes. Still, there are enough substantial changes to make this version worth upgrading to, including a broader detection base and strong mobile support for both iOS and Android. Editors' note: Portions of this review are based on  Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2012. Trend Micro's updates for 2012 make some substantial yet largely under-the-hood changes to the Titanium suites. Several excellent features only available in the premium Titanium Maximum Security place the highest-end version above its siblings. However, since the difference between Internet Security and Maximum Security is only $10, it's hard to say no to the premium upgrade.

Installation
The new Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2012 sports a rapid-fire installation. Once you've completed downloading the installer, the entire process is over in less than a minute. There's one screen where you're asked to fill in an e-mail address before you can run Titanium Maximum Security, but that's the extent of the registration hoops that are required. Although a reboot isn't mandatory, the program seems to run better after one.
You can also disable your contributions to the Smart Protection Network, Trend Micro's behavioral detection net, during installation. Doing so won't make you less safe. It will only prevent your data from becoming part of Trend Micro's analyses.
Interface
Titanium 2012 offers a marginally different interface from last year. The two differences are that the parental controls and system tuner have swapped places on the main screen, and that you can now apply skins to customize the interface. Not exactly world-shaking alterations, which is an acknowledgment of how the company feels last year's major overhaul is doing. In a word: great! (Well, the company thinks it's great, anyway. We certainly don't mind it either.)
The UI that debuted last year was different and minimalistic, and is a great choice for people who don't want to struggle with their security. The top quarter is taken up by a large icon and bar declaring your security status, and below it are three major security fields and a registration status indicator.
In these three quick-access slots are the Security Summary, System Tuner, and Parental Controls. Click the boldface name of one of the three to open a drop-down revealing more information; for example, under Security Summary, you'll see number and type of threats stopped. This perhaps could be phrased better, since if no threats have been detected on your computer, then you will see that "0 threats have been stopped." Accurate, yes, but slightly misleading, too.
The Support link lives in the upper right corner of the interface, marked by a text link and an icon of a boat's lifesaver ring. At the bottom of the interface live a one-click scan-on-demand button to initiate a Quick Scan, a drop-down arrow to change scans, a Settings icon, and a Security Report button for jumping to a screen that collects recent threat detection, system performance, and parental control notifications into charts and graphs.
For advanced security features, you must click on the blue Tools button in the bottom-left corner. It's the only blue button link in the interface, so it stands out well. Clicking on it reveals smartphone app-style buttons for Parental Control, Data Theft Prevention, System Tuner, Secure Erase, and the Tool Center. Each one has a status indicator letting you know if it's been activated.
The Tool Center opens the Web site for Trend Micro HouseCall, which is a free, online-only tool for removing malware.
Clicking through the others takes you to a landing page for each, which comes with an option to hide the landing page in the future. Since the landing pages only contain brief descriptions of the features within, it'd make more sense to spare you the bottleneck and put the descriptions somewhere else.
Within each tool is a sharp layout of features and instructions on how to use them. The interface is that rare combination of uncluttered and helpful, bringing the featured tools to the fore without feeling overwhelmed. And although each tool opened in a new window, it opened smoothly and replaced the window below it so that the main Trend Micro pane was always easily accessible. If only other complicated programs were this well-designed.
Features and support
The big new feature last year was that Trend Micro Titanium, like Google Chrome, instituted automatic updates, removing the necessity of updating your virus definition files. The autoupdates in Titanium theoretically led to a higher level of security that was more responsive, too. The behavioral-detection approach worked well for Norton, Panda, and Microsoft. No doubt moving detection to the cloud made the program run with less interference in your system, and after a year, it's hard not to conclude that it is effective.
You can still schedule scans in Titanium, which you can do from the Virus and Spyware Controls panel under Settings. On that same tab, you can configure how Titanium handles various other security protocols.
In its 2012 version, Titanium adds two new engines to the fold. One is designed to detect and remove the "fake antivirus" type of malware, also known as ransomware, that plagues many people. The other stops botnets that might have infected your computer.
Titanium Internet Security does offer the kind of robust, full-featured protection that's expected from a top-shelf security suite. Along with antivirus, anti-malware, and malicious link protection, Titanium Internet Security protects your installed applications from being altered without your permission, optimizes the Windows firewall, and provides spam guards. There are also parental controls, identity guards for protecting credit card numbers and passwords, the aforementioned Department of Defense-standard file shredding, and the Trend Micro Vault, which is a remote file lock that will seal off files when you tell it to, say if your laptop has been stolen.
Trend Micro comes with a toolbar that autoinstalls only in Firefox and Internet Explorer. But for a few exceptions, security suites have been ignoring Chrome, which is a serious miscalculation in our opinion. It's reminiscent of schools of art that get ignored until they become cultural leaders: are the makers of consumer security suites simply not taking Chrome seriously yet? Or do they feel that it's too secure of a browser to be susceptible to social-engineering attacks that other browser users suffer from? We suspect the former, although the security companies' sluggishness implies either willful ignorance or the latter.
You can deactivate the toolbar in the Settings window after you install, although it's a bit annoying that you can't turn it off before you install. Internet Explorer 9 indicates that running the toolbar slows down the browser's start-up by 1 second. It also doesn't really contain much in the way of features, besides giving Titanium hooks into your browser so it can evaluate Web site search results.
Titanium did well with value-added features last year, introducing the system tuner and online backup. The system tuner is quite robust and cleans your Registry, looks for recoverable disk space, cleans out start-up links to programs that no longer exist, deletes Internet cookies, and removes software histories including instant message logs to prevent spyware from accessing them. The online backup tool includes a standard 2GB of encrypted online storage. It includes syncing and sharing, and there's an option to purchase unlimited storage space.
Value-added enhancements in Titanium 2012 cover both the useful, like secure erase, and the gimmicky, like the aforementioned selection of new interface skins for the Windows version. Does anybody spend so much time in their security suite that they want to skin it?
The Titanium firewall component generally relies on the excellent Windows Vista and Windows 7 firewall to get the job done. It does come with a firewall booster option, under Network in the Internet and E-mail Controls tab in the Settings menu. This activates the network-level firewall, which is a component that Windows is missing, but Trend Micro clearly doesn't think it's crucial, as the firewall booster is disabled by default.
There are some hang-ups with Titanium, though. For one thing, you can't access the interface while the program is starting, although you can when scanning. A more troublesome problem is that the suite doesn't really possess much in the way of virus and malware removal. It presupposes that it will block all threats that attempt to crack your system. As noted above, Trend Micro's HouseCall tool is the company's de facto post-infection threat killer, and it's Web-based. That may make some users skittish.
Added features in Titanium Maximum Security 2012 but not Titanium Internet Security 2012 are enough to make up for the $10 price differential. These include eight more gigabytes of storage, locally stored password-protected folder vault, remote file lock, public Wi-Fi authentication, mobile OS security including Android and iOS, and social networking wall scanning. Performance
In its first year on the street, Titanium's new detection system proved itself handily. Although it wasn't the most effective suite last year, it was certainly in the upper echelons of security offerings. This year, Labs and independent third-party testing organizations found that Titanium has continued an upward trajectory that nevertheless leaves room to grow. Titanium Internet Security 2012 shares the same detection engines as its less feature-laden siblings, Titanium Maximum Security 2012 and Titanium Antivirus 2012, so all three are discussed here.
  Labs' benchmarks showed that the Titanium suites were frustratingly uneven. The Quick Scan was the fastest  Labs has tested so far this year, with the slowest of the Titanium suites coming in at more than 400 seconds faster than the second-fastest suite, and they also had the lightest touch on computer shutdown times. However, Titanium had the biggest impact on system boot times, with the Titanium suite that was fastest at boot still adding 20 seconds more than the next-slowest competitor.
In the era of security-suite-free Windows 7 computers that often take no more than 30 to 40 seconds to boot, and tough competition from Macs and Chromebooks that can boot in 20 to 30 seconds, doubling Windows' boot time is unacceptable. Note that CNET Labs has changed test computer operating systems, from a 64-bit version of Windows 7 to Windows 7 64-bit running Service Pack 1, so while we can mention the differences between last year's results and this year's, they're not directly comparable.

Security program	Boot time	Shutdown time	Scan time	MS Office performance	iTunes decoding	Media multitasking	Cinebench
Unprotected system	40	6	n/a	395	120	342	17,711
Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2012	88	11.3	502	437	125	345	17,290
Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2012	94.8	11.7	465	406	126	344	17,238
Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus Plus 2012	83.3	12.4	449	419	126	342	17,084

*All tests measured in seconds, except for Cinebench. On the Cinebench test, the higher number is better.
On a real-world Windows 7 computer, we found that the Quick Scan finished up in 4 minutes, 48 seconds, when averaged from three cold-boot runs. Also over three cold runs, the Full Scan took 2 hours and 11 minutes to complete. These times are interesting to note because they're much slower than last year's results, and much slower than the results Trend Micro predicted. It's not clear why the Quick Scan took nearly 4 minutes longer on average to complete than it did last year. We're going to chalk up the problem to a software glitch or installation error for now. Certainly, if you're seeing Quick Scan times that slow, get in touch with Trend Micro's tech support.
Third-party labs that look at the efficacy of virus detection and removal found Trend Micro 2012 equally uneven. While scoring high on threat detection and blocking from independent testing agency AV-Test.org, and earning low false-positive scores (that's a good thing), the Titanium suites did not do well on infection removal. During the first quarter of 2011, when tested on a Windows 7 computer, Titanium Internet Security 2011 scored 3.5 out of 6 on Protection, 3.5 out of 6 on Repair, and 5.5 out of 6 on Usability for an overall score of 12.5 out of 18, just above the minimum of 11 for an AV-Test.org certificate.
In the second quarter, on a Windows XP computer, Titanium Internet Security 2011 scored the same, 12.5 out of 18. The suite hit 4.5 out of 6 on Protection and Usability, and 3.5 out of 6 on Usability. Note that AV-Test.org defines its categories as follows: "The 'Protection' covers static and dynamic malware detection, including real-world zero-day attack testing. In case of 'Repair,' we check the system disinfection and rootkit removal in detail. The 'Usability' testing includes the system slowdown caused by the tools and the number of false positives."
Third-quarter results aren't in yet, but results shared by AV-Test.org with CNET indicate that the suite continues to perform well. It notched a 99.25 percent malware detection rate, higher than the overall average rate of 96.14 percent in July 2011 certification testing, ahead of Kaspersky's May score of 98.5 percent and just behind Bitdefender's 99.53 percent. However, Titanium was able to remove only 64.5 percent of active malware infections, way below the industry average of 80.7 percent. The rootkit detection and removal rate was average, with 90 percent detected and 70 percent removed. In AV-Test.org's zero-day attacks test, Kaspersky blocked 92.9 percent of the attacks, compared with the average July 2011 certification results of 85.7 percent. The suite also did not generate any false positives.
So, in short, AV-Test.org found Trend Micro Titanium 2011 and the new 2012 to be effective but not among the best of the best.
The most recent AV-Comparatives.org Whole Product test, which looks at on-demand scanning, retroactive tests, and "real-world" guards including cloud-based protections, puts Trend Micro 2011 in the top six suites tested. The June 2011 test found that it blocked 99.3 percent of attacks and threats thrown at it, only behind F-Secure and Panda. Meanwhile, looking at Whole Product test results cumulatively from January to June 2011 Trend Micro 2011 came in sixth, blocking 98.6 percent of threats.
A third testing lab, Dennis Technology Labs, found Trend Micro Titanium 2011 to be the one of the best suites it tested. Dennis Labs placed Titanium second out of 11 suites tested, with a Total Accuracy score of 142 out of 150--just behind Norton 2011. However, this test was conducted in January 2011.
It's fair to conclude that according to third-party tests, Titanium has been effective over the past year, but not remarkably so. However, because of weak malware removal scores, an enormous impact on boot time, and not getting the highest scores on the detection and prevention tests, we'd like to see better from Trend Micro in the future.
Conclusion
Trend Micro leaped forward and took a risk in 2011. It didn't for the 2012 suites, but it didn't have to. Instead, 2012 sees a solid upgrade, with some clever new offerings. If you don't care about the social networking, storage, or mobile support, then Titanium Internet Security 2012 might just hit your sweet spot, but it's hard to ignore the lackluster threat removal scores. The abysmal boot-time impact must be improved, too. If Titanium can polish those areas, then that would be showing some mettle we could really get behind.

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