Surf’s Up Out of all the Internet Security Suites available in the market, let us take a closer look at BitDefender’s latest release to check out if it has any features that make it stand out from the crowd. Included in the functionality of the suite are features like an anti-virus utility, anti-spyware, anti-phising and anti-spam protection, a complex firewall, parental controls and a special mode unique to BitDefender called ‘Gamer mode’. So does it deliver to its promise?

Features: There are four main categories in BitDefender—PC Security, Network Security, Identity Control and Parental Control. These work together in order to ensure that you have a safe surfing experience, with no tension about what your kids view when they are online, or if some malicious spyware has stepped into your machine.

PC Security: It monitors in real-time, issues like anti-phishing, anti-spam, database definition up-to-date, and offers real-time protection against virus on P2P file-sharing applications and on access to files.

Network Security: The two components in this category are the Firewall and the Stealth Mode. The firewall automatically detects intruders whenever you connect to a network, it monitors your IP and Gateway address and blocks suspicious activity and intrusions, and a graph performance indicator of all your incoming and outgoing network activity. The three protection levels provided are ‘Ask’, this level questions any and all types of activities, ‘Allow’ questions only those which are not on a pre-defined list, and the third level ‘Game’ which applies to the current rule set but does not question any that occur in the future.

Identity Control: Monitors any changes in your current identity, which refers to protection of your privacy. You can create an identity profile, for instance, set up a rule for your credit card numbers, and check Web pages and e-mails that require your information before you send it. You can also control personal information like addresses, bank account numbers, e-mails, passwords, pins, telephone numbers and SSN (social security numbers) or the Indian equivalent, PAN card numbers. This personal information will be encrypted. Similarly you can set up registry control, cookie control and script control rules for applications and Web pages. By default, cookie control and script control are not enabled but you can shift your privacy mode to ‘Aggressive’ to enable these features. BitDefender collects information about your system, for instance, Start Up items, services and Winsock providers.

Parental Control: All user accounts on your machine can be monitored and secured via Parental Controls. When you enable Parental Control for a user account, you set a password that only authorized users can disable. Web controls will restrict access to user specified and predefined websites, block execution of certain applications, block emails and Web pages that contain keywords and phrases, and limit the time that the user can spend online. Heuristic Web filter has three operational modes, ‘Teenager’ which is mildly restrictive, ‘Child’ is severely restrictive, and ‘Adult’ which has no restrictions. The Internet has tons of Web pages, and not all of them will be listed in the BitDefender database as ‘clean’. With the heuristic Web filter, it can safely estimate the probability that the unknown Web page contains inappropriate or explicit content.

Anti-Spam: The Anti-Spam wizard will guide you about familiarizing the application with junk and clean filters, by examining your address book contacts and creating Bayesian filters after analyzing the e-mail in your Inbox and Junk folders. With the Learning Engine and NeuNet heuristic filter BitDefender effectively blocks e-mail messages with explicit content from spammers by tagging the subject line or the body of the e-mail.

Performance

AV-Test.org (www.av-test.org) tested BitDefender Anti-Virus, along with 30 other anti-virus applications, on a Windows XP Professional SP2 system. The only area where BitDefender didn’t perform well was the scan speed and the massive physical memory space it occupies. On our test machine it accounted for close to 202 MB RAM, and on a system with a total physical memory of 512 MB RAM, it is about 40 percent. AV-Comparatives (www.av-comparatives.org) labs’ test results are tabulated above.

Using the firewall was a little tricky, since it didn’t automatically recognize our Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail client; we had to add it in to the allowed application list before being able to access the Internet. Parental Controls’ strong point was that unless you had knowledge of the password, unauthorized users couldn’t access blocked Web pages. To test the anti-phishing feature, that is, the identity control, we created some rules and sent e-mail messages containing the Rule data, but none of the e-mails containing this personal information was blocked from being sent, from the Outbox folder.

Verdict

The anti-virus protection integrated with your Web browser for safer surfing puts BitDefender over the top—get this suite for complete security.