MicroWorld eScan Internet Security Suite With Cloud Security

Pros Good scores in independent antivirus lab tests and our own tests. Cleans up traces of computer and browser activity. Secure deletion. Rescue Mode can scan when Windows won't boot. Device and application control for business. Cons Phishing protection slowed browsing, failed testing. Spam filter slowed mail download, failed testing. Limited parental control. Significant system impact. Dated, awkward user interface. Bottom Line MicroWorld eScan Internet Security Suite with Cloud Security scored well in antivirus lab tests and our own tests. However, other components failed in testing, and this suite put a significant drag on performance. By Neil J. Rubenking When you install a security suite, you don't have to pick and choose each security component separately, and integration of all the components should mean less drag on system performance. MicroWorld eScan Internet Security Suite With Cloud Security ($45.95 per year; $65.95 for three licenses) offers all the expected suite components along with a few extras. However, the quality of the components varies quite a bit. //Compare Similar Products Compare Bitdefender Internet Security 2015 $49.95 BitDefender see it Kaspersky Internet Security (2015) $29.22 Amazon see it Symantec Norton Security $46.41 Amazon see it McAfee Internet Security 2015 $23.25 Amazon see it TrustPort Total Protection 2015 $39.95 Amazon see it G Data Total Security 2015 This suite's main window features eight large panels on a world map background. Each panel represents a major security component, and displays simple stats about that component. Clicking a panel lets you drill down to turn features on and off or adjust settings. I found many of the settings dialog boxes to be cramped and dated-looking, but then, you won't spend a lot of time fiddling with settings. View all 8 photos in gallery Shared Features This suite includes all of the protective components found in MicroWorld eScan Anti-Virus With Cloud Security $22.45 at Amazon. For full details on those shared features, please read my review of the standalone antivirus. I'll summarize here. MicroWorld eScan Internet Security Suite With Cloud Security Lab Tests Chart MicroWorld eScan Internet Security Suite With Cloud Security Malware Blocking Chart MicroWorld eScan Internet Security Suite With Cloud Security Antispam Chart The independent antivirus testing labs that include eScan in their reports give it generally good marks. In particular, it would have earned an Advanced+ rating (the highest rating) in four separate tests by AV-Comparatives. However, false positives (good programs identified as bad) knocked two of those ratings down to Advanced. eScan's scores are good, but Bitdefender Internet Security 2015$49.95 at BitDefender and Kaspersky Internet Security (2015)$29.22 at Amazon earn excellent ratings across the board. In my own hands-on testing, eScan detected 86 percent of malware samples and earned 8.4 of 10 possible points, the best score among products tested using my current malware collection. Webroot SecureAnywhere Internet Security Plus (2015)$29.99 at Webroot detected 100 percent of my previous sample set and earned a perfect 10 points. Firewall protection is something most vendors reserve for a security suite, but MicroWorld offers a firewall in the standalone eScan antivirus. The firewall blocked port scans and Web-based attacks in testing. In its default configuration, it only performs minimal program control; with filtering set to interactive, it pops up a query any time an unknown program attempts network access. It didn't actively block exploit attacks at the network level, though the antivirus component whacked the executable payload for some. Note that Symantec Norton Security$46.41 at Amazon blocked every exploit in this test. MicroWorld eScan Internet Security Suite with Cloud Security Main Window Spam filtering also isn't a common antivirus feature, but eScan's antivirus includes it. In testing, the spam filter proved ineffective. It flagged 7.9 percent of valid personal mail as spam, missed 28.6 percent of undeniable spam, and significantly slowed the process of downloading email. Norton and McAfee Internet Security 2015$23.25 at Amazon didn't identify any valid mail as spam and missed just 7.0 and 4.4 percent of spam respectively. The antivirus shares a number of security-related tools with the suite. Most impressive of these is Rescue Mode, a bootable scanner that can handle ransomware and other malware attacks that render Windows unusable. Related Story See How We Interpret Antivirus Lab Tests Related Story See How We Test Malware Blocking Related Story See How We Test Antispam Poor Phishing Protection MicroWorld include phishing protection in this suite, but not in the eScan antivirus. By default, phishing protection is configured for Normal Filter (Fast, Medium Accuracy); You can optionally set it to Smart Filter (Slow, High Accuracy). When I ran my antiphishing test using the default configuration, the antiphishing component did absolutely nothing. I had to run the test again with Smart Filter enabled before I saw any sign of phishing protection. As promised, surfing with Smart Filter enabled was noticeably slow. Pages took longer to load. However, the other part of the description, High Accuracy, didn't manifest when I tested the product using a selection of very new phishing URLs. MicroWorld eScan Internet Security Suite With Cloud Security Antiphishing Chart Because the actual URLs used are different for every test, I rate products in comparison to other antiphishing solutions. In particular, I use Norton for comparison because it consistently does an excellent job. I also check the same set of URLs against built-in phishing protection in Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. eScan's detection rate came in a full 66 percentage points behind Norton's. It also lagged significantly behind all three browsers. And, as noted, this was with the browser-slowing Smart Filter enabled. Don't rely on this product for phishing protection. Related Story See How We Test Antiphishing Endpoint Protection MicroWorld pitches the eScan product line to businesses as well as consumers. Endpoint Protection in particular is a business-oriented solution, in two parts. Like TrustPort Total Protection 2015$39.95 at Amazon and G Data Total Security 2015, eScan's Device Control lets you limit what devices can be used. In particular, you can require a password for access to USB devices in general, but whitelist specific permitted ones. If an employee inserts a USB drive found in the parking lot, eScan won't let it connect. Application Control is the other half of Endpoint Protection. It comes pre-configured to block a collection of computer games, instant messengers, music players, and peer-to-peer sharing applications. Parents may find this feature useful as well. You can add any program you want to the blocking list, and the kids can't defeat this feature by moving or renaming the program. You can also set a schedule for when Application Control is active. For example, in a work situation, you might disable it during the lunch hour. Parents could use it to ban computer games at night, when the kids should be asleep. Limited Parental Control Parents can choose to enable parental control features by associating the children's Windows user accounts with one of four profiles. The available profiles are Adult, Adolescent, Teenager, and Walled Garden. Under that last profile, the content filter blocks all Internet access except sites that parents have actively whitelisted. MicroWorld eScan Internet Security Suite with Cloud Security Parental Control eScan assigns websites to one or more of almost 70 categories, and each profile comes predefined to block a specific set of these categories. Even the Adult category blocks several categories, among them Pornography, Drugs, and Alcohol. You can customize any of the profiles, but scrolling through the cramped not-quite-alphabetic list of categories is a pain. Do be sure to leave the Anonymizers category blocked; otherwise a smart kid could evade all parental control by connecting through a secure anonymizing proxy. For each profile you can also define a schedule for Internet usage. eScan uses the familiar full-week grid, but adds a twist not found in most parental control systems. In addition to defining times when Internet access is and is not permitted, you can identify certain times when content filtering isn't active. I'm not sure why you'd want this. Parental control is browser-independent, so your kids won't get around it by loading some weird off-brand browser. And the time restriction system can't be fooled by tweaking the system date-time. However, I did find that parental control can be disabled using a simple three-word network command—that's not good. The parental control report lists all websites visited or blocked, with a date-time stamp for each. I was surprised to find that it doesn't indicate which user account was involved with blocked sites. You can get that information by perusing the less-attractive Web Protection Log. As for advanced features like instant message monitoring and control, social media monitoring, and remote management, you won't find those here. Bitdefender and Kaspersky both offer comprehensive parental control. For full-scale parental control and monitoring, you'll be better off with a standalone product like ContentWatch Net Nanny 7$39.99 at ContentWatch or Qustodio Parental Control 2015$19.99 at Amazon. Privacy Cleanup You use the Privacy Control component to wipe traces of your browsing and computer usage, either manually, at startup, or on a daily schedule. It will clear recently-used file lists, empty the recycle bin, and clear your browsers' cache, cookies, and history. Separate tabs let you view precise details about cached files, cookies, ActiveX controls, plugins, and browser history. If you really want to, you can delete individual items from these lists; most users won't. MicroWorld eScan Internet Security Suite with Cloud Security Secure Deletion Buried in the Privacy Control dialog is an awkward secure deletion utility that overwrites files and folders 15 times before deleting them. You can't drag things onto it. You can't even select what to delete using a normal Windows dialog box. Rather, you must navigate to the desired folder in a tiny folder tree and either add that folder to the list for deletion or add individual files from a tiny file list. You can right-click the list to delete items manually, or let eScan delete them as part of the cleanup process Notable Performance Impact Perhaps ten years ago, security suites had a deservedly bad reputation as resource hogs. Fortunately for all of us, those days are gone. Modern security suites are streamlined and optimized to minimize their impact on system performance. Well, most of them are. SecurityWatch I had a feeling that my test systems were sluggish, and my hands-on performance tests supported that feeling. To start, I ran a test that measures boot time. Specifically, it subtracts the start of the boot process (as reported by Windows) from the time the system is ready to use. I define "ready to use" as ten seconds in a row with CPU usage less than five percent. MicroWorld eScan Internet Security Suite With Cloud Security Performance Chart Averaging 100 tests with eScan installed and 100 with no suite, I found that the boot process took 38 percent longer. That's not the biggest slowdown I've seen, but it's close. Quite a few suites, among them Bitdefender, Kaspersky, and Webroot, showed no slowdown at all in this test. You probably reboot your computers no more than once per day, but you're manipulating files all day long. For testing purposes, I time a script that moves and copies a massive collection of large files between drives. I was quite surprised to find that this script took more than twice as long with eScan present than with no suite. Another script that zips and unzips that same collection only took 33 percent longer, but that's still the biggest slowdown of any recent suite. Related Story See How We Test Security Suites for Performance Look Elsewhere The antivirus component in this suite is pretty good, and the firewall is decent, but that's all. Its spam and phishing detection systems aren't accurate, and its parental control is limited. And in my testing, it significantly impacted system performance. You'll pay a little more for Bitdefender Internet Security 2015 or Kaspersky Internet Security (2015). They're both $79.95 for three licenses, compared to eScan at $65.95. But the extra 15 bucks is money well spent. All the components in these two Editors' Choice suites do their job well, and without slamming system performance. Sub-Ratings: Note: These sub-ratings contribute to a product's overall star rating, as do other factors, including ease of use in real-world testing, bonus features, and overall integration of features. Firewall: Antivirus: Performance: Antispam: Privacy: Parental Control:

MicroWorld eScan Total Security Suite with Cloud Security

By Neil J. Rubenking It's very common for security companies to offer both an entry-level security suite and an enhanced "mega-suite" with more features. Most of the goodies that distinguish MicroWorld eScan Total Security Suite with Cloud Security ($55.95 per year; $79.95 for three licenses) from the company's entry-level suite (MicroWorld eScan Internet Security Suite with Cloud Security$49.95 at Amazon) relate to improving performance, but there are some distinct security benefits as well. //Compare Similar Products Compare Bitdefender Total Security 2015 $69.95 BitDefender see it Symantec Norton Security $46.41 Amazon see it Webroot SecureAnywhere Internet Security Complete (2015) $29.99 Webroot see it MicroWorld eScan Internet Security Suite With Cloud Security $49.95 Amazon see it McAfee Total Protection 2015 K7 Ultimate Security Gold 14 G Data Total Security 2015 TrustPort Total Protection 2015 $39.95 Amazon see it This suite's main window features nine large panels representing nine major security areas, with a map of the world in the background. Most of the panels display relevant statistics; all of them can be clicked to dig in for settings and reports. The entry-level suite and standalone antivirus (MicroWorld eScan Anti-Virus with Cloud Security $22.45 at Amazon) use the exact same layout, just with fewer buttons (eight for the suite, five for the antivirus). View all 8 photos in gallery Shared Features This suite includes all security features of the entry-level suite, naturally. Note, too, that the firewall and antispam components are present even in the standalone antivirus. Do please read those reviews for full details of the shared features. I'll summarize here. MicroWorld eScan Total Security Suite with Cloud Security Lab Tests Chart MicroWorld eScan Total Security Suite with Cloud Security Malware Blocking Chart MicroWorld eScan Total Security Suite with Cloud Security Antispam Chart MicroWorld eScan Total Security Suite with Cloud Security Performance Chart The independent testing labs that include eScan generally give it good marks. In particular, it would have earned Advanced+, the top rating, in two tests by AV-Comparatives and Advanced, the second-best rating, in two others. If false positives hadn't marred some results, all four scores would have been Advanced+. In my own hands-on malware-blocking test, eScan detected 86 percent of the samples and earned an overall score of 8.4 points, out of a possible 10. That's the best score among products tested using my current set of samples. Webroot SecureAnywhere Internet Security Complete (2015)$29.99 at Webroot managed a perfect 10 points against my previous sample set. eScan's protection rate in my malicious URL blocking test was 38 percent, just slightly below the current average of 40 percent. McAfee Total Protection 2015 continues to own the top spot in this test, with 85 percent protection. The suite's simple firewall component correctly blocked port scans and put all the test system's ports in stealth mode, hidden from outside attack. In its default configuration, the program control component doesn't do a lot; when switched into interactive mode it popped up a query every time an unknown program tried to access the network, asking whether to allow or deny access. I couldn't disable firewall protection using techniques a malware coder could employ. eScan filters out both spam and malware from incoming POP3 email. However, the spam filter significantly slowed the process of downloading email, and its accuracy was poor. It flagged 7.9 percent of valid personal mail as spam, and allowed 28.6 percent of undeniable spam into the Inbox. McAfee and Symantec Norton Security$46.41 at Amazon, by contrast, discarded no valid mail and missed just 4.4 percent and 7.0 percent of the spam, respectively. MicroWorld eScan Total Security Suite with Cloud Security Main Window The Endpoint Protection component seems mostly aimed at business. It lets an employer block or limit access to any program and comes with predefined lists of games, instant messengers, and more. You can also use it to limit the devices that can be connected. For example, it can require a password before allowing a USB drive to be mounted. This component gets a slight enhancement in Total Security—it adds the ability to log all files copied to USB drives. That could be handy in a business setting. Parental control is present in the suite, but limited. For each Windows user account, you can set it to block websites matching any of 70 categories, and it includes the ability to schedule just when each user profile is permitted to access the Internet. It logs all websites visited or blocked, but the log doesn't indicate which user account was involved. And a simple three-word network command disables it. The suite includes the ability to wipe out traces of your browsing and computer activity, for privacy. Buried in the Privacy Control console is a secure deletion utility that overwrites files 15 times before deletion, to prevent forensic recovery. It works, but its user interface is very, very dated. In my simple suite performance tests, eScan's entry-level suite demonstrated more impact on system performance than any other recent suite. I re-ran these tests with Total Security installed; the results weren't appreciably different. eScan caused a serious slowdown in all three tests (boot time, file move/copy, and file zip/unzip). Related Story See How We Interpret Antivirus Lab Tests Related Story See How We Test Malware Blocking Related Story See How We Test Antispam Related Story See How We Test Security Suites for Performance Antiphishing Improved Now for some positive news. When you install the mega-suite, it adds the eScan Web Safe toolbar extension to your browsers. This extension marks up search results in popular search engine pages, flagging each as good, average, poor, or unknown. You can't click through to a detailed report on each page the way you can with McAfee or Norton, but you'll be well advised to stay away from sites with a poor reputation. I ran my antiphishing test again, to see if this additional layer of Web-based protection might help. As with the entry-level suite, I configured the antiphishing component to use what it calls Smart Filter (Slow, High Accuracy), because when I left the Normal Filter active, it did nothing at all. MicroWorld eScan Total Security Suite with Cloud Security Antiphishing Chart The combination of the browser extension and the Smart Filter did a much better job of detecting fraudulent websites. eScan's detection rate still lagged 25 percentage points behind Norton's, but then, very few products can match Norton. Bitdefender Total Security 2015$69.95 at BitDefender is among the few. eScan's entry-level suite didn't match the detection rate of built-in protection in Chrome, Firefox, or Internet Explorer. With help from the toolbar, Total Security managed a detection rate 20 percentage points better than Firefox (though it still didn't beat Chrome or Internet Explorer). Just leave your browser's built-in protection turned on, so eScan and the browser can work together to detect fraudulent sites. Related Story See How We Test Antiphishing Identity Protection Your PC is littered with personal information, and data-stealing Trojans exist to scrape that info and send it to their evil masters. It's also possible you may want to prevent your kids from over-sharing personal data using the family computer. The Identity Protection component aims to help with both these problems, but it has a few wrinkles. To start using Identity Protection, click the corresponding panel on the main screen, click the Start link in the page that appears, and then click the Settings link. Now you can enter your data items for protection. You can protect credit cards, bank accounts, SSNs, and such from theft, or enter the home phone and address so the kids can't give those away. MicroWorld eScan Total Security Suite with Cloud Security Identity Protection A similar feature in Bitdefender keeps the private data items encrypted. Once you've entered that data, you can't view or edit it again. With eScan, you can click Modify and see the data, which could be a security risk if you ever walk away from your desk without logging out. Be sure to password-protect eScan's settings if you use this feature. When I went to test this feature, I ran into trouble. I defined "fnord" as a secret, then tried searching that word on Google, sending it as a message via Yahoo mail, and entering it as a username for a made-up Amazon account. In each case, I got a transient popup telling me that Identity Protection blocked sending the data. And in each case the data was visibly sent—Google performed the search, I received the secret data in email, and Amazon actively rejected the made-up account, referencing the non-existent username. Digging into the program's user guide online, I found the problem. Identity Protection doesn't handle HTTPS traffic, and all of my test cases used HTTPS. The lack of HTTPS support is a bit surprising, since even the example in the user guide suggests using this feature to protect a password, which would of course be entered on a secure site. Worse, there's nothing to stop a data-stealing Trojan from applying encryption to the data it's hoovering up from your system. This could be a useful feature, but the lack of HTTPS support cripples it. Additional Tools Clicking the Tools link at the bottom of the main window brings up a number of useful tools. Some, like the alternate-OS Rescue Mode scanner, USB vaccination, and check for missing Windows patches, are present in all of the eScan product line. But Total Security adds new tools, and some are genuinely useful. The Vulnerability Scanner checks popular programs to make sure they have no missing security patches. If it finds a problem it offers a "Click to update" button. It seems to work. On one test system it correctly determined that both Firefox and Adobe Reader needed an update. A Registry Cleaner module scans your system's Registry seeking useless and erroneous items in 16 categories. It lists all found issues, and gives you the option to pick which should be fixed. However, the list doesn't clearly identify what's wrong with each item, so you don't really have the information you'd need to pick and choose. Most likely, clearing all found issues won't do any harm, but if it does, there's no option to reverse the changes like you can with K7 Ultimate Security Gold 14 and some others. Like G Data Total Security 2015 and TrustPort Total Protection 2015$39.95 at Amazon, eScan offers a disk defragmenter utility. Modern versions not only have disk defragmentation built in, they can keep disks optimized in the background. I can't see a need for this tool. Perhaps it's left over from a much older version of this suite. SecurityWatch eScan also lets you export all of the program's settings and import them on another PC. If you're the type who spends time tweaking security settings to your satisfaction, or if you've set up a raft of Identity Protection items, you may find this feature useful. Better, But… MicroWorld eScan Total Security Suite with Cloud Security is definitely an improvement over MicroWorld's entry-level suite. In particular, the website rating system helped bring up the product's antiphishing score. However, the two suites share some serious weaknesses, including an inaccurate spam filter and an inordinate impact on system performance. Bitdefender Total Security 2015 is our Editors' Choice for security mega-suite. It costs ten bucks more than eScan for three licenses, but it also offers a huge collection of features that all work well. If what you want is protection for all your devices, regardless of operating system, our cross-platform Editors' Choice is Symantec Norton Security. For the same price as a three-pack of eScan, it protects five devices; for ten dollars more it protects ten devices, and adds online backup. Sub-Ratings: Note: These sub-ratings contribute to a product's overall star rating, as do other factors, including ease of use in real-world testing, bonus features, and overall integration of features. Firewall: Antivirus: Performance: Antispam: Privacy: Parental Control:

Centurion SmartShield Plus Antivirus

By Neil J. Rubenking Picture this: Your computer is unusable because all your files have been encrypted, and the ransomware that did the dirty deed demands 300 euros, or else it will throw away the encryption key. What a nightmare! Wouldn't it be great if your antivirus would let you go back in time, before that nasty ransomware attack? Well, that's precisely what Centurion Technologies's SmartShield Plus Antivirus ($39.99 per year) does. It does a fine job rolling back system changes, but the antivirus component needs to step up its game. //Compare Similar Products Compare VoodooSoft VoodooShield 2.0 Anti-Executable 5.2 Quietzone Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus (2015) $19.99 Webroot see it Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2015 $39.95 BitDefender see it Kaspersky Anti-Virus (2015) $36.62 Amazon see it F-Secure Anti-Virus 2015 $39.99 F-Secure see it McAfee AntiVirus Plus 2015 $39.99 Dell see it SmartShield's essential Drive Locking component runs in three modes: Unlocked, Work, and Locked. When it's in Unlocked mode, it's not doing anything; your only protection is the antivirus module. In Locked mode, it virtualizes absolutely every change to the file system and Registry, but responds to all programs as if those changes were real. When you reboot the system, all of those virtual changes vanish, as if they never existed. View all 8 photos in gallery Of course, if some of those "changes" were files representing your homework, or edits to the latest chapter of your novel, you don't want to obliterate them. The handy Work mode behaves exactly like Locked mode, except that it refrains from virtualizing the folders you specify. In the ransomware scenario mentioned above, rebooting would get rid of the malware but retain your work. Educational Installation To get started, you'll download and launch the 32-bit or 64-bit edition of the program. You'll need a license key to complete the installation; there's no free trial. You'll also create a password to protect your settings. The installer warns that if you forget this password it can't be recovered. That worried me; could you be locked into a Groundhog Day scenario, never able to make changes that would last past a reboot? My contacts at Centurion reassured me that their support team can restore the system to normal. After the necessary reboot, the installer launches a quick guide to the program's features. This guide presents an explanation of the three functional modes. You use Unlocked to install programs and Windows updates. Work mode is for working, like it sounds, so the files you create and edit will be saved, but not any unwanted changes. And Locked mode is for just surfing the web, letting someone else use your computer, testing software, and so on. Just to make sure you get the point, the guide offers a simple visual showing when your data and other changes do and don't get past the shield. It winds up with a detailed chart of how specific actions work in each mode. Whether you learn best by reading descriptions, seeing diagrams, or perusing charts, one of these pages will surely bring you to SmartShield enlightenment. Drive Locking Settings The program's pastel-decorated main window clearly identifies the current working mode. You can tweak a slider to change the mode, but actually implementing the change requires a reboot. SmartShield clearly shows the current mode and the mode that will be active after reboot. By default, ten folders are identified as exceptions in Work mode. They are: Desktop, Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos, Saved Games, Downloads, Contacts, Searches, and Links. You can remove any of these, or add an arbitrary folder, for any user or for all users. Centurion SmartShield Plus Antivirus 740 SmartShield stores all of the virtualized system changes in one big file. Clicking Advanced Settings lets you change the size of this file, though you can't shrink it below the specified minimum. Naturally you can only resize this file and redefine which folders are exceptions when you're running in Unlocked mode. Other Avenues VoodooSoft VoodooShield 2.0 also aims to prevent harm by malicious programs, but it takes a very different approach. In Locked mode, it prevents execution of every unknown program, period. And it enters Locked mode automatically when you're online or when you have a USB drive mounted. It does include an option to sandbox unknown files. That's a kind of virtualization, but unlike SmartShield's virtualization system, VoodooShield's interfered with execution of many programs. Anti-Executable 5.0 also blocks execution of any files not on its whitelist. However, Anti-Executable is significantly more complicated to use than VoodooShield. The product most similar to SmartShield is Quietzone. Like SmartShield, it's simple to operate, and it virtualizes all system changes except in user-specified work directories. It doesn't have separate Locked and Work modes, but it does let you start virtualizing without a reboot. You still have to reboot to revert changes. Some Limitations Of course, if a data-stealing Trojan infests your system and sends your nude selfies to Elbonia, rebooting won't recall that data. Emails that you sent while in Locked mode don't vanish. Only changes to files and Registry items that remain on your computer can be wiped out, and this is true of any protection-by-virtualization product. It's worth noting that the virtualization system has a maximum capacity. Most users won't ever overload the system, especially those who reboot frequently. I demonstrated for myself (and confirmed with Centurion) that overloading SmartShield can cause serious file system problems. If you encounter any odd error messages while copying or creating files, just reboot and the problem should vanish. Silent Antivirus You have to reboot into Unlocked mode any time you want to install a new program, get program updates, or update Windows. While you're in this mode, any malware that manages to slip onto your system can install itself and otherwise make permanent system changes. SmartShield's antivirus component, powered by Cyren, aims to protect your system while it's vulnerable. Unfortunately, it doesn't do a very good job. SmartShield Quarantine None of the labs I follow include SmartShield, and only a few test Cyren's technology. West Coast Labs and ICSA Labs certify Cyren for virus detection. Virus Bulletin includes Cyren in testing, but it doesn't do well. Cyren participated in nine of the last dozen tests by Virus Bulletin and only received VB100 certification in two of those. That's not much to go on. When I opened the folder containing my current set of malware samples, SmartShield's antivirus component silently wiped out 43 percent of them. I proceeded to launch the surviving samples; the antivirus did nothing. On the plus side, a ransomware sample that forced a reboot effectively committed suicide—after reboot, not a single trace from any of the malware samples remained. SmartShield doesn't add any browser plug-ins and doesn't attempt to block access to malware-hosting URLs. I ran my usual malicious URL blocking test regardless, expecting I would see the antivirus component quarantine the downloaded malicious executables. Of the 100 malware samples I downloaded, 99 came through unscathed. The one outlier repeatably caused a Windows error message; it couldn't be copied to the Downloads folder. I suspect SmartShield had a hand in that, though nothing appeared in the Quarantine list or logs. You may notice the absence of my usual lab tests and malware blocking charts. I'm not treating this product as a regular antivirus; that's not its aim. The antivirus component just serves to limit what malware can do between reboots. SecurityWatch The developers at Centurion are looking at using a different antivirus partner for the next version. Based on my experience, that's a very good idea. For now, you're better installing without the antivirus (that's an option) and using one of the better free antivirus utilities for protection between reboots. Don't just layer another antivirus on top of SmartShield's; you don't want dueling antivirus utilities. And remember that you need to switch to Unlocked mode to update the antivirus. You might also consider Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus (2015)$19.99 at Webroot; its behavior-based detection system makes it less reliant on updates than most. Virtualization Works With SmartShield Plus Antivirus installed, you can undo any harm caused by malware with a simple reboot. This can be useful for anyone, but especially on a shared or public computer. You do need to stop relying on Sleep mode; if you don't reboot regularly, SmartShield can't help. And don't rely on it for antivirus protection when the virtualization system is turned off. I look forward to SmartShield's next version; what I hear from the developers sounds quite