WINDOWS SECURITY SUITES COMPARED

Need a security suite for your PC? Nathan Taylor scrutinises our top eight choices.

Need a security suite for your PC? We scritinise the top eight.

With cybercriminals getting ever more aggressive, there has never been a better time to get hold of a security suite. The best security suites now provide full-spectrum protection for your system. That means they protect you not just from viruses and hackers, but also from a host of other attacks: phishers, account hacks, scammers, ransomware, Wi-Fi hacks, even crapware.

Here, we’ve looked at our top three picks of the current security suite market, as well as the next five down.

TEST RESULTS

Each of the suites reviewed here has been comprehensively tested by independent antiviral analysis company AV-Test ( www.av-test.org). We’ve published the latest results available at the time of writing, from June 2016.

The results are not, in all cases, from the specific products we’ve reviewed. For example, we may have reviewed the full suite where AV-Test may have only tested the standalone antivirus application, or we may have a product that has been updated since the tests were performed in June. That doesn’t change the validity of the results, since the same antivirus engine is in use. Let’s break down what the numbers mean: Protection against 0-day malware attacks is a measure of the suite’s ability to detect new viruses based on their behaviour. It’s perhaps the most important number here. Detection of widespread and prevalent malware shows the detection percentage of known viruses released in the four weeks before the test. The performance impact ratings give percentages by which the suite slows down a high-end PC when performing common tasks. (Note that we used results from a high-end PC since they tend to be more notable). False warnings is the number of instances where the suite flagged legitimate software and web sites as a threat and either blocked it or produced a warning popup. For convenience, AV-Test also provides three overall scores, rating each suite’s protection, performance impact and usability out of six, to give a total score out of 18. (Usability, in this instance, is not a reference to ease-of-use, but based on the number of times the program produced false popups and blocked legitimate software). We should note that AV-Test’s aggregate scores are based on combined May–June performance, while we’ve only printed June results for space reasons.

We also don’t have room here to review every antivirus product tested. We limited ourselves to the suites that we currently think are the top picks based on both their test results, features, usability and value for money.