Kaspersky Internet Security for Android

Long a Windows security powerhouse, Kaspersky Lab has recently established a strong mobile presence with Kaspersky Internet Security for Android. In the latest version, a new alarm feature works with an anti-theft management portal to help you track down a lost or stolen device and even remotely photograph the perp. The app also provides protection from malware and phishing attacks. Add in built-in data privacy and filtering tools for calls and texts, and you have a fairly well-rounded mobile security solution. However, the app could be easier to use. MORE: Best Android Anti-Virus Software 2014 Setup To set up Kaspersky Internet Security for Android, go to the Google Play store, search for the app and tap "Install." Users can also sideload the app by going to Kaspersky's Software Upgrades Web page and manually downloading the .apk file. Setup is simple: After the app finishes downloading, choose your country of residence, accept the Privacy Statement and End User License Agreement and create a Kaspersky account by providing an email address and a password. This registered our Samsung Galaxy S4 for Kaspersky’s free anti-malware protection and features. At this point, tapping the shield icon in the app will start the first anti-malware scan. Then we went to the Web portal and entered an activation key for the premium version for the app which could be applied to up to 5 devices. After activating, we chose from the Web portal to apply it to our Samsung Galaxy 4, which activated the premium features on our device. Interface The home screen of Kaspersky Internet Security for Android is devoted to an oversized color-coded shield icon: It's green if the app thinks you're secure, yellow if you're at risk and red if there's a serious threat. This visual signal gets the point across, but it's light on details and heavy on alarm. The app has two main menus. The first, and more visible is a tab in the upper right corner, indicated by the standard Android menu symbol, three horizontal white lines. Click that, and you'll go to a page with information about the last scan performed, whether you need to update the anti-virus database and what kind of license you're running. The more useful, but less obvious, menu is on the homepage in the lower right-hand corner indicated by a caret in a white circle. Tapping this option displays the app's other features, such as Privacy Protection and Anti-Theft. Detection and performance Kaspersky Internet Security for Android provides three different anti-virus-scanning options: "Quick scan" for installed apps, "Full scan" for the entire device and "Folder scan," which only looks at a specified folder and its subfolders. Avast, McAfee and Lookout also give you full scan or partial scan options. The app's most recent build, 11.2 for Android 4.3, got a perfect score on AV-Test's malware detection scan, successfully locating all 2,191 malware samples the testers threw at it. McAfee Mobile Security and Norton Mobile Security also achieved perfect scores; Lookout and Avast weren’t far behind with respective scores of 99.4 percent and 98.7 percent. MORE: Mobile Security Guide: Everything You Need to Know We put the app's anti-virus capabilities to the test, downloading the well-known test virus called EICAR onto our Samsung Galaxy S4. Any mobile anti-virus software package worth its salt should pass this very basic test. Kaspersky Internet Security for Android did not alert us when we downloaded EICAR using the mobile Chrome browser. However, when we ran a scan, the app easily picked up the EICAR files and moved them to quarantine. Installing Kaspersky Internet Security on your phone or tablet could improve its performance, but the app's scan may significantly slow down your device while it's in progress. Our test Galaxy S4 phone scored a 2,145 on the Geekbench 3 performance test before installing Kaspersky, then a higher 2,347 afterward. But the benchmark during a full scan was 1,573, substantially lower. That's a performance hit, or delta, of 774 points. Lookout Mobile Security only saw a delta of 130 points, and Avast (626-point difference) and Norton (656) also fared better. Only McAfee's app caused our S4 to take a bigger hit (1,064 points). Anti-theft and data protection To activate Kaspersky Internet Security for Android's anti-theft features, you need to give the app administrative privileges; tap "Anti-Theft" in the app and it will walk you through the process. From the Kaspersky Web portal, users can locate a device via GPS and get it to emit an alarm. Kaspersky offers two ways to remotely wipe device data. "Wipe personal data" deletes all data on the phone or tablet's microSD memory card (if it has one) as well as call history, your Google Play account, email and social-networking accounts, text messages, contacts and calendar events. "Wipe data" wipes everything on the memory card and the phone, including all user-installed apps, and restores the phone to its default factory settings. MORE: 9 Tips to Stay Safe on Public Wi-Fi The "Mugshot" feature uses the device's front-facing camera to take five rapid photos of the phone's location or its user and immediately posts the photos on the Web portal. Kaspersky’s anti-theft features are standard among all the mobile security suites we reviewed. Kaspersky Internet Security for Android also has a couple of a smartphone-only features. SIM Watch immediately locks the phone if the SIM card is removed and sends you an email alert that includes the device's location. If you've given the Kaspersky app permission to access your location, SIM Watch can switch on GPS and locate your phone more precisely. It's the same with the alarm; even if your ringer is set to mute, the device will emit a loud noise if the alarm is activated. The other smartphone-only feature, Privacy Protection, hides your phone's contacts and communications. If you hand your phone to someone else to show them a picture or a video, that person won't be able to snoop on your personal conversations. (You can exit Privacy Protection mode with a passcode you set up in the Kaspersky app.) The Browser feature in the Kaspersky app, on both smartphones and tablets, can be activated with a single tap. Kaspersky will block any malicious links and webpages on the built-in Android browser as well as on Google Chrome. Norton and Lookout’s security apps have nearly identical features, but McAfee’s Web protection extends only to the Android browser. Avast's app, on the other hand, covers Chrome, the Android browser, Amazon's Silk browser and the Chinese Boat Browser; support for the popular Dolphin browser is in development. Finally, the Call and Text Filter feature creates blacklists and whitelists for phone numbers, cutting down on unwanted calls and SMS spam. Parents can set their children's phones to only receive calls and texts from specified numbers. Among rival security apps we tested, Lookout Mobile Security didn't offer any blacklisting feature at all, and Norton could create only blacklists. McAfee and Avast, however, offered much more nuanced control over blacklists and whitelists. Kaspersky notably doesn't have a data-backup feature. Most Android phones have built-in Google backup features, but the other apps we reviewed offered some kind of alternative data backup. MORE: Best Anti-Virus Software 2014 Norton, for example, had the most basic backup plan, letting you back up your contact list. Lookout adds call logs and photos to that; McAfee beats Lookout by adding text messages and videos; and Avast backs up everything McAfee does, plus apps. Web console Kaspersky's Web portal is clean and efficient. Sign in with an email address and password at my.kaspersky.com — which is not linked to from the main Kaspersky site — and you'll see a page listing your registered devices. Click a device to access its anti-theft features. The portal will tell you if your device's anti-virus database is up to date and whether it is protected. Clicking "Lost Your Device" will access the anti-theft features such as lock, alarm, locate, Mug Shot and data wipe. You can also recover a forgotten PIN. Premium vs. free The free version of Kaspersky Internet Security for Android is a limited version of the paid app. It still scans for malware using Kaspersky's thorough database of threats, but the scans are not automatic; you'll have to go into the app and press "Scan." Privacy Protection, Call and Text Filter and the safe browser are all premium-only features. The free version does include automatic updates of the anti-virus database — the strongest part of Kaspersky's mobile protection — and all of the anti-theft features accessible from the Web portal. That's not as feature-rich as the free version of Lookout Mobile Security, which lets users back up contacts to the cloud, install backed-up contacts to new devices and, through its "Signal Flare" feature, even locate lost devices with dead batteries. Verdict Kaspersky Internet Security for Android's anti-virus detection rate is top-notch. It also comes with all the anti-theft features you'd need, plus the ability to hide personal information, such as contacts and messages, from the prying eyes of friends and family. However, Kaspersky's unintuitive interface is a turn-off, and the app doesn't offer as many features as Avast Mobile Security or Lookout Mobile Security. Notably absent is a privacy adviser that shows you how much personal information all installed apps access. Kaspersky gets the job done, and you can trust it to keep your phone safe from malware. But you may want to check out other options first.