McAfee Internet Security Suite 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