McAfee Internet Security Suite 2006

Monday, January 23, 2006

A complete security suite with anti virus, anti spam and privacy protection that's effective and easy to use, allowing you control over those who can use your PC for Internet access

You can't secure your desktop with an anti-virus software alone these days, which is why the available solutions combine all the necessary elements into one. Take the McAfee Internet Suite for instance. It's an all-in-one package that includes an anti virus, a firewall, a privacy service that provides security from information thefts and a spam killer. It's pretty easy to install, that takes just six steps, and using it post installation is also a breeze. The McAfee Privacy Service is one interesting feature that requires the user to authenticate before connecting to the Internet. The updates process is also easy and straightforward, and wraps up in appreciable time on most connections.

We put the suite to a rigorous test against a compilation of some of the most notorious viruses created. It managed to detect pretty much everything we threw at it, whether it was single virus files or compressed files with viruses; or compressed files within compressed files with viruses. The firewall provided by McAfee has a good set of configuration settings, and provides more features than the Windows firewall. It provides an option for summary, which is further categorized into Main Summary for general category and Application Summary, Event Summary and Hacker Summary. The latter three provide summaries for the activities of applications, events and hacking attempts respectively. It also provides options for viewing all activities of these categories in detail. The firewall provides four different security levels-Tight, Standard, Trusting and Open. There is also a feature of locking down the computer, which blocks all traffic including browsing, e-mail and even McAfee updates. The Privacy Service feature lets the user monitor all activities on the machine while connected to the Internet. It creates a log of activities that display detailed activities from the date and time of first run. The user can save logs at a custom location but we didn't find any auto-save option for the same purpose. The user can set 'Allowed Sites' list for the privacy service. One thing we liked about this package was that you can create different users and grant them different access permissions. Permissions are for allowed/restricted sites, cookie preferences and even specific words. 

McAfee Security center wondow that shows the options to configure all the features

The good thing is that it you can define permissions as per user's age. The users that are created are not the same as Win XP users, which is pretty good. So even if you're logged on as administrator, you can't access unless you provide the right credentials. Coming to the Spam Killer, the feature maintains a global 'filter' which it keeps updating. Users are, of course, allowed to create their own black lists. The good thing is that besides recognizing pop e-mail accounts, it also recognizes Web-based accounts. You'll have to provide the password for the latter though. 

Once configured, the Spam Killer acts as a layer between the mail client and the mail server, keeping the mail client away from any direct access. Another notable feature of Spam Killer is that it constantly scans the e-mail address book and keeps a tab on the friend's list.

Bottom Line: Overall, it's a pretty good security suite that meets all the security needs of individual desktop users. We liked its Internet control feature. A small hitch while going through some forums on the Internet was that a good number of users feel that McAfee's 'Live Technical Support' is expensive.

Anadi Misra

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