Effective Antivirus

Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus (2015) is the tiniest antivirus around, and its installation and scanning are both super-fast. The mega-suite is slightly bigger, but it still takes about one tenth the disk space of the average suite. Read my review of the antivirus for full details. I'll simply summarize here.

None of the six independent labs I follow currently include Webroot in their regular testing, though Dennis Technology Labs will add Webroot in the first quarter of 2015. A private test by Dennis Labs earlier this year revealed that Webroot would have earned top-level AAA certification. Webroot was also one of just three product to pass in a test by MRG-Effitas.

 

Webroot's malware detection relies on a cloud service that analyzes program behaviors, not on antivirus signatures. On detecting an unknown process, Webroot starts journaling all its actions and watching for signs that it's malicious. If a process steps over the line, Webroot reverses all of its actions. Until a process gets the green light, irreversible actions like transmitting information to the Internet are suppressed.

I observed this feature in action; some of my malware samples initially seemed to get past the antivirus, but after a few minutes it started wiping them out. In the end it earned a perfect 10 points in my hands-on malware blocking test.

 

The suite also earned a very good score in my malicious URL blocking test. This test challenges each antivirus with 100 extremely new malware-hosting URLs. I record whether the product blocked access to the URL, wiped out the malware payload during download, or did nothing. With 73 percent blocking, Webroot did better than all but a handful of its competitors.

 

Sub-Ratings:

Note: These sub-ratings contribute to a product's overall star rating, as do other factors, including ease of use in real-world testing, bonus features, and overall integration of features.

Firewall: http://www.pcmag.com/images/pcm_3_5_dot.gif

Antivirus: http://www.pcmag.com/images/pcm_4_5_dot.gif

Performance: http://www.pcmag.com/images/pcm_5_dot.gif

Antispam: n/a

Privacy: http://www.pcmag.com/images/pcm_3_dot.gif

Parental Control: n/a

 

Full Article