KIS 2009 Review Part 2

Here we go then, hold on to your tonsils, its part two of my review...

Living with it

Arguably the most important part of any background software on your computer: how is it to live with day to day? You don't want something that jumps in your face every time you do something, or it thinks you need to be alerted that your firewall has just noticed a stray packet and is mildly alarmed that your system may be compromised. On the other hand you don't want it to sit there and do nothing and then when queried responds, 'Oh yeah your system is infected with xyz, do you want me to get rid of it for you?'.

With that in mind then time to see how KIS shapes up. Very well is the answer to that, unsurprising given that they have been in the field for some time, and should have a firm grasp of how users prefer things to act, and what they want from security software.

The software sits quietly in the background, alerting you whenever it finds something infectious or requiring some input from you. It could do everything automatically, but likes to check with you first, in case that suspicious file is something you perhaps know about but are sure is clean. If it does find a virus though, it deals with it and removes all trace from your system with the minimum of fuss or interaction.

The one caveat to that is the firewall that loves to automatically classify everything into one of four categories, Untrusted, High Restricted, Low Restricted, and Trusted. It scans the application when its first ran and the firewall determines from that where to place it. Helpful yes, not always entirely accurate though. Also is slightly less secure than manually asking you to allow traffic and certain types of traffic to and from an application, aka Zonealarm for example. You can manually move the applications freely around the four categories, but its still not giving you total control over how that application accesses the internet.

For the layman though overall the whole system is very good, very little interaction means they are less likely to be confused by security warnings and accidently click the allow instead of the deny button and render their system a little less secure than before.

Updates are regular and are done without any loss in system security or speed. You can ask the software to alert you when its updated if you wish, but as its done every hour, they can get a little annoying and the default is probably best, of not telling you, just doing it. You can manually update them if you wish, however its not the end of the world if you just leave it alone.

The Antispam element deserves special praise from me though, as its the only one that i have used that actually has a plugin for Mozilla Thunderbird. All the usual emails clients are covered, Outlook, The Bat etc, but Thunderbird usually gets missed off.
Training the system is as easy as training the inbuilt Thunderbird filter, class mail as spam or not spam, and the system learns what constitutes a spam message. KIS also has some inbuilt databases to give it a head start, and these are very good for avoiding the dreaded false positives that plague most antispam software.

Overall then the software (minus the firewall) has been very good and can be reccommended for both casual users, those that browse the web and get email, and proper ardent users of a computer, those who know what a kernel, spyware and keyloggers actually are. In the final part of the review i shall focus on system performance, and once again review the good and bad points of the suite.

Till next time, don't do anything daft, unless you have a permit.

KIS 2009 Review Part 1

I think its probably time to give you some idea of what i think of KIS 2009. This will be part one of several, not sure how many yet, but I'll try and keep them reasonably condensed.

Installation

Could have been easier, lets put it that way. I don't honestly believe Kaspersky intended it to be quite as difficult as i made it but still...

Started off quite promisingly, uninstalled Nod32 and Comodo Firewall, did the normal reboot that is required when you do that sort of thing, and then all hell broke loose.
Windows arrived back on the screen and immediately i knew something was amiss as i got a huge pop-up "Your System is INFECTED!". Blimey, just a minute, let me get a cup of tea and a biscuit and you can fill me in on the details.

In the four seconds it took me to launch the Kaspersky installer, i had been infested with something called MicroAV. Annoying little bastard it is too, pops up every time you try to do anything, which hampers trying to install the software to get rid of the thing. I even tried to do it in safe mode, but as installations of software can only occur in 'proper mode' according to the vista message i got, that didn't help me much.

Finally managed to get Kaspersky installed and it went a bit downhill again then. Having installed it and restarted (again) it duly informs me that its not activated and needs doing. No problem, i have me key handy, so i click on Activate Now and wait....and wait....oh...its crashed. That's handy then. Try again...nope crashed again...repeat ad nausem...

I then had to become slightly counter productive, and uninstall the program that should have cleaned my system up, restart and install it again. It then occurred to me that when i installed the first time, i had disabled the internet to try and avoid a massive spyware invasion. The second time i left it connected and hoped for the best. Turns out this was a very good idea as the installer told me there was an updated version of Kaspersky and did i want it, much clicking of yes and it downloaded a 37meg update which actually activated and worked properly.

Turns out however that KIS 2009 is more prevention than cure, as trying to conduct a scan that would remove the infections whilst it was sorting out the firewall and working out which programs were safe and which weren't is quite hard. I dare say it would have removed the infections, but i was that pissed off with pop-ups by this stage that i just downloaded other spyware removal software that i know works, removed what bits i could, and sorted the system out that way.

Once i had removed the obvious stuff and got a computer that worked properly, i did conduct a full system scan, and it did find some stuff hidden away in temp directory's and other places and removed them. Whether it has caught the lot i don't know, but everything seems fine up to now.

And now we arrive here, everything is installed, everything is working and the system is ticking along as it should. So what do we draw from this early foray into KIS? Once installed it seems good, if my system was clean, I'm sure the install would have been smooth and painless, but alas. Based on that though, so far I'm quietly impressed, time will tell if i remain so...

T-Shirt

Just whilst you're waiting to get the low down on KIS 2009, im a fan of wild and amusing t-shirts, and thought this image would look superb on one:

I'm Back

Well yes, after over a two year absence, i have finally found something worth writing about!

Hold on to your hats, cos depending on your interests, this may or may not be of interest to you.

Recently i have managed to legally (crumple) acquire a 100 day free trial key for Kaspersky Internet Security 2009. Which i found quite intriguing...

Stay tuned for some facts, pros & cons, and general impressions of the software that numerous experts think is one of the best security suites out at the moment.