Kaspersky Internet Security 2009
Kaspersky Lab $59.00 http://www.kaspersky.com/ 1-800-406-4966
As anyone with a computer knows, we are drowning in a sea of spam and malware. The problem is exacerbated by the significant percentage of people with computers who have either no anti-malware software, or who don’t bother to keep it current.
While we find this puzzling, we don’t fall into that group, and, at the moment, use Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 as our PC anti-malware program of choice. We have chosen this software for several reasons. It is an integrated program, containing a virus scanner (used by a number of other similar products), firewall, popup blocker, email scanner, the ability to protect your computer registry, and more. This is good, because you don’t have to buy, install, and maintain multiple programs. It is easy to install: Just accepting the defaults will give the unsophisticated user good protection.
The program updates its databases regularly – it seems to do an update every hour or so – and uses less memory and system resources than other anti- malware programs we have used, which is a relief even on a powerful machine with a lot of memory.
Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 has a number of features, like parental control, which we didn’t look at. A feature we only recently discovered – it is new in the current version – is a security analyzer, which looks at all your programs and tells you which ones are compromised, and where to get updates. We updated Java, as well as a few other programs, and got rid of the vulnerabilities.
It also scans for rootkits, which often modify parts of the operating system or install themselves as drivers or kernel modules. While some rootkits are malware designed as malware, others are by folks like SONY, whom one would have thought knew better, with its dangerous DRM rootkit (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/11/sonys_drm_rootk.html).
While Kaspersky has business solutions, we only looked at tools appropriate for the home and small-office user. This program has our recommendation.
