McAfee+ Advanced
Expensive, but this powerful suite supplements malware protection with unusual identity protection features
PRICE (Unlimited devices, individual) First year, £63 (£75 inc VAT), renewal £125 (£150 inc VAT) from mcafee.com/en-gb
Cut loose from Symantec and now fully focused on consumer security, McAfee has added a couple of new products to the top end of its range: McAfee+ Premium and Advanced, which currently slot in above McAfee Antivirus Plus and
Total Protection.
They’re at the top end of the price bracket, too, with Premium coming in at £100 per year for an individual subscription and £120 for a family deal, while Advanced costs £150 for individuals and £170 for families. First-year discounts are available for new subscribers at £75 for the first year of Advanced and £50 for the first year of Premium. Those are deep discounts, but make sure the renewal fees don’t surprise you.
Unlike other McAfee subscriptions, Premium and Advanced support an unlimited number of devices, which could be a real boon for the household that has some kind of computer or mobile device in every room. Family subscriptions add parental control software but are otherwise the same as their individual counterparts.
Both of the new tiers include a full subscription to McAfee Secure VPN, which has been upgraded to use TunnelBear’s infrastructure and finally has a kill-switch, bringing its feature and performance in line with the rest of the market. There’s also a password manager, identity monitoring to see if your data appears in any known breaches, and a
Personal Data Cleanup service.
For Premium users, that clean-up service will alert you to information held about you for sale by online data brokers, making it easier to contact them and request its removal. Advanced subscribers get a fullservice removal package, in which McAfee will contact data brokers for you and keep you off their data lists. The service currently covers ten data brokers in the UK and 40 in the US.
This is an extremely unusual feature that’s more often found as a specialist identity protection service for people at risk of doxxing or identity theft, and it could be greatly reassuring.
Advanced subscribers also get extra identity protection and recovery features, including support lines you can contact in case of a lost wallet or suspected identity theft. Here, someone will guide you through the process of contacting banks and other institutions to remedy the situation.
This kind of identity protection service is still relatively unusual in the UK and Europe. Norton LifeLock provides a similar service with Norton 360 Advanced at a similar price, making the two services direct rivals. If you have to choose between the two, though, Norton doesn’t currently offer data broker removal in the UK and produced a rash of false positives in recent tests by AV Comparatives, making McAfee the better choice.
McAfee’s performance in recent group tests has been excellent. It detected all malware with no false positives in AV-Test’s latest roundup of Windows consumer antivirus tools. In AV Comparatives’ tests, it picked up 99.7% of malware and a single false positive, and it blocked 100% of malware in SE Labs’ tests, but dropped to 99% in its total accuracy rating for blocking legitimate software.
It’s really good at protecting you against malware, but even in its latest incarnation, McAfee has a reputation to overcome. It’s a market leader, but a lot of this dominance originated by dint of trial versions coming preinstalled as part of deals with PC makers. This in turn led to a lot of complaints from users who just wanted to get rid of it.
Then there’s the industry-wide problem of subscription rates that go up after the first year. A 2021 judgement by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority ( pcpro.link/ 343CMA) told McAfee to make it easier to switch off auto-renewals, to provide clearer information about pricing, and to offer refunds to users who made a claim within 60 days of the payment being made. Some would say that the
CMA needs to look at McAfee’s rivals, too.
All the usual features you’d expect of an antivirus suite are present and correct, including real-time and scheduled scans, an easy-to-use firewall, software updater, cookie and tracker remover and an online security portal.
If you’re willing to spend a large chunk of money on security software with some high-end identity protection features, or if you want to at least take advantage of the first-year offers and carefully cancel afterwards (in-store licences for physical purchase aren’t available yet), then McAfee+ Advanced is definitely the way to go.
If you just need to protect some PCs from malware, on the other hand, then Avast, G Data and indeed Microsoft Defender all fulfil that task similarly and cost a great deal less.
“The clean-up service alerts you to information held about you by online data brokers, making it easier to request its removal”