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Kaspersky Internet Security 6.0.2.614 - Review

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Kaspersky Internet Security is a mature security software that also includes personal firewall features. Kaspersky Internet Security benefits from its multilayered security design and although this design is not bulletproof, it is one of the best that are available today. This software also offers pleasant and well arranged user interface. So, even if not perfectly secure, we can recommend Kaspersky Internet Security to end users.

Contents:

• Tested version
• Installation and initialization
• Hardware requirements
• Common behaviour and control
• Security
• Bugs
• Screenshots
• Private information

Tested version

We have tested Kaspersky Internet Security version 6.0.2.614 because its vendor, Kaspersky Lab, have discontinued the development of its stand-alone personal firewall product called Kaspersky Anti-Hacker long time ago. However, we have installed and tested only the minimal core of KIS, which includes anti-virus, and personal firewall components.

The vendor provided us a licence for the purpose of our testing. Such a licence is usually available for $59.95 and includes one year of updates. The two years licence costs $95.92.

Installation and initialization

The downloadable version of Kaspersky Internet Security is delivered in 22 MB self-extracting executable. This size is reasonable for a security suite that includes anti-spam, anti-spy, anti-virus and personal firewall components. Just after you choose an installation folder, you are asked to choose the installation type. Complete installation, Custom installation and Anti-virus features only are offered choices. We chose Custom installation to be able not to install Anti-spam, Anti-spy, on access File Anti-Virus, Mail Anti-Virus and Web Anti-Virus. The only components we installed were core components, Proactive Defense and Anti-Hacker FireWall. Keep this in the mind while reading this review because some information like hardware requirements might be different if you install other components too. After you choose the type of the installation, you are asked whether you want to enable Self-Defense before the raw installation. This is probably an attempt to protect the installation process against possible malware attacks. We left this option enabled. The next step is the raw installation of files, services and drivers, this takes no more than a few minutes.

The post-installation configuration is done via Initial Setup Wizard. This wizard is started as soon as the first part of the installation is finished. At first, you are asked to activate your licence and even trial licences have to be activated if you want to have an access to security updates. The next step is quite important. You are asked to choose whether you want to enable only Basic protection, which is selected by default and recommended for most users, or Interactive protection, which is recommended for experienced users. We strongly recommend you to choose Interactive protection, because if you choose Basic protection the system will not be fully protected. We chose the better protection and also enabled Application Integrity Control, which is disabled by default. The configuration of automatic updates follows. You can also perform an update in this step, this can take a few more minutes. Then you can configure regular anti-virus scans and in the next window you can enable a password protection of your settings. To achieve the best security settings, we recommend you to enable the password protection even if you are the only user of your computer. You can also choose which parts of the settings will be protected by the selected password.

The last part of the installation is the configuration of additional protection and network related settings. In this part, KIS automatically initializes its internal database of programs that are allowed to access the Internet and recognizes the network interfaces in your computer. You can always modify the settings that were configured automatically. The last step is to restart your computer. After the reboot, you are advised to perform a full anti-virus scan of your computer.

The installation process is pleasant and quite easy and fast even for common users. To achieve the highest level of security KIS can offer, you have to slightly modify the predefined options during the post-installation configuration. KIS received no penalty for the installation process.

Hardware requirements

Our installation of Kaspersky Internet Security took about 27 MB on the hard disk and about 15 MB in the RAM. These values would be reasonable even if KIS was only a personal firewall software, but its core also includes the anti-virus, and so these values are better than good. On the other hand, it reduces the performance to about 73% in average. This number was highly affected probably by Registry Guard component, because we have measured much lower performance during extensive work with the system registry. As mentioned above, these values can be different if you install more of KIS components. The hardware requirements of KIS are no problem for today's computers.

Common behaviour and control

The user interface of Kaspersky Internet Security is well-developed and nice. It fully supports the internal architecture based on many separate, but well connected, smaller components. The main window is divided into three parts. The first one is a structured menu, in which you select what do you want to work with in the main part of the window. If you select Protection, you will be informed about the current state of the security on your computer. You can get more information about the state of each component you have installed by clicking on it in the menu. If anything in the security system needs your attention you can see it in the third part of the main window, which is a small information box. In such case, you are also informed via on screen notifications, so you do not have to open the user interface everytime. KIS is not intrusive with its notifications if you do not want it to be. You can precisely configure, which notifications you are interested in and which does not bother you at all. The next item in the menu is Scan. This is devoted to anti-virus scanning of your computer. You can start custom scans of your disks, single folders or critical areas of your system. The last item in the menu is Service, where you can check your current product version, the exact time and date of your last updates and also the state of your licence. You can also run updates from here, view security reports or contact KIS support.

Configuration of all settings is made in a separate window. Settings of personal firewall features can be changed in Proactive Defense and Anti-Hacker submenus. Proactive defense is divided into four categories as in the post-installation configuration wizard. Be sure to have enabled at least the first three modules called Application Activity Analyzer, Application Integrity Control and Registry Guard. If you use Microsoft Office, you can find Office Guard useful too. Application Activity Analyzer monitors the behavior of all processes in the system. Application Integrity Control is something like the component control that you can find in many other personal firewalls. Registry Guard monitors the access to system registry and alerts when a critical part of registry is to be changed. The most of the features these components provide are highly configurable, which comes handy if you have a harmless application that behaves uncommonly, you can easily add it to the trusted zone and you will not be notified about its activities any more. The Anti-Hacker component is the firewall itself. KIS offers five modes of firewall from Allow All to Block All. At the beginning, Training Mode may be the best choice, in which a prompt appears if any application attempts to connect to the network or the Internet. The detailed configuration allows you to view and change the list of applications that are allowed or blocked to establish network connections. You can also configure the access to single TCP and UDP ports as well as to configure other protocols. The last features related to personal firewall security can be found in the Service menu. You should have Self-Defense enabled here and you can also set your password here. Not only if you administer more desktop computers with KIS installed, you can find useful a possibility to save and load the configuration to or from the file.

The tray icon offers a fast access to both main and settings windows and to Network Monitor. You can also quickly block all the network traffic, run anti-virus scan, perform an update as well as pause or disable the whole KIS protection from the tray icon popup menu.

The only problem we have found in the common behaviour and control was missing help. For example, in Proactive Defense alerts in case of suspicious driver installation you can click on the name of the event and instead of getting some detailed information, your browser is opened on a page that says "Can't find virus record". This is an issue of many of alerts from various components and can be very unpleasant for basic users. This is why the Easy of use for Kaspersky Internet Security is on 95%.

Security

On one hand, we were quite surprised that Kaspersky Internet Security suffers from a number of security related problems that should not appear in the software like this. KIS makes an impression of a mature product, whose developers should be aware of problems and vulnerabilities that commonly affect security software. On the other hand, the security design is quite a good one. The system of separate but well connected components forms a multilayered security design. This means that even if some part of protection is bypassed it usually does not imply that all the security mechanisms are bypassed and the attacker is not able to take a full control of the system. In spite of this, there still exist several ways how to bypass the protection of KIS completely.

KIS implements a very interesting security related feature called Rollback. The Application Activity Analyzer component closely tracks the actions of any programs that runs in the system. If the application is to make something dangerous, the prompt appears. The users are able to check the list of all actions the application made and base their decision on this information too. Moreover, if the dangerous action is blocked, Rollback can be performed, which means that all tracked activities like registry modifications, new file creations etc. are reverted by KIS back to the state before the blocked application started.

The tested version of KIS has a very good anti-leak protection, Windows messaging oriented attacks seem to be a problem for KIS today. To achieve mentioned very good leak-testing results it is necessary to properly configure the security settings. We have been informed that future versions of KIS will fight possible leaks even better.

In spite of all problems we have identified during our analysis, we can say that KIS offers a solid protection and we can recommend this product to users that demand high level of security. No, KIS is not a perfectly secure or bulletproof solution, there are still quite many ways how its protection can be bypassed, but among the competitive products KIS is one of the best. And because of its good security and overall design, it can be relatively easy for the vendor of KIS to improve this product to put the bar even higher. You can see the public information about bugs we found in Kaspersky Internet Security in the following sections below.

Screenshots

Main window - Protection Main window - Anti-Hacker Notification settings Protection - Reports Settings - Anti-Hacker Settings - Application Integrity Control Settings - Protection Tray icon popup menu Self-Defense alert Anti-Hacker training mode Proactive Defense Alert

Private information

Are you interested in this product? Do you want to know more about it? Read on the methodology page about our offers or contact us to get more information.

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