McAfee Internet Security 2009

The latest version of McAfee comes with a host of new features including

quick scan, alerts and easy set-up. Features included in the suite are

protection against anti-virus/anti-spyware, and anti-phishing; firewall

protection, identity protection and website advisor which warns the user with

color coded ratings about unsafe websites.

McAfee SecurityCenter has an easy to understand user interface. An

interesting feature is the SystemGuard, which basically monitors, logs and

manages changes made to the system registry or critical files. Changes that are

not common and indicate any potential threat are immediately reported and

logged. The stealth mode blocks all incoming network connections thereby making

the system invisible to internet intruders. The parental control feature allows

the user to set browsing time limits, filters inappropriate images and restrict

access to specific websites. This feature also provides a password vault where a

user can securely maintain a list of all the passwords. This list is also

password protected, so the user has to remember only one password instead of

many. Another welcome change in the software is that it does not interrupt the

user with alerts, updates, etc when the user is busy watching a movie or playing

games in full-screen mode. This software also provides a option to back up and

restore files. To run this feature the system should have .NET framework 1.1 as

it runs in its own environment.

A user can back up files to a CD, DVD, USB drive, external hard drive or

network drive. The interface is easy to use and provides the user with a variety

of options. The user can set the location of files and also the type of files to

be looked for. Once the location and types are defined, the backup takes place

at regular intervals. These intervals are customizable according to user needs

and can be done on demand as well. A user can back up data in two ways -quick

and full. In full mode, a complete back up of the defined files is taken, while

in quick mode the backup of those files to which changes are made is taken.

McAfee provides back up of data by compressing it to reduce disk space usage

and also by encrypting it to prevent its theft. This feature can be disabled if

required.

Tests and results



We installed the software on a Windows XP machine. For anti-virus testing we
scanned our virus database and it was able to detect almost all viruses and

clean/quarantine them. For checking the firewall capabilities we ran DoS attacks

through backtrack. The software was able to block the attacks but it did not

raise any alarms nor anything was mentioned in the log records. We also checked

the anti-phishing capabilities by visiting a few phishing sites and software was

able to detect and raise a warning. We checked the software for e-mail scans and

it was not able to detect zipped viruses but when tried to extract the same, it

did raise an alarm. The software needs to improve upon the zipped virus

detection. The Avg. CPU consumption during scan was 60% which is on the higher

side as compared to Norton's latest release which we reviewed in our last issue.

Also the average RAM consumption during scans was quite high at 76% whereas

Norton's new release only consumed 39% of the RAM during scans.

Bottomline: It is an easy-to-use produ ct but

its system resource consumption is a bit high.