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.