Hands-on Review: Kaspersky Anti-Virus

After its showing in virus.gr's test last month of how well 58 different security applications dealt with 147,000 virus samples, I thought it would be a great idea to take a look at Kaspersky Internet Security, the anti-virus portion of which scored #1 on the list, catching 99.62% of all viruses on the test machine.

I gave Kaspersky Internet Security 6.0 a spin and it works as well or better than the names you're probably used to. But it does offer some unique features that do indeed put it above many of its compatriots. Its most noteworthy feature is hourly virus updates. Most antivirus applications update daily or even weekly, but Kaspersky pushes a new definition file several times a day, meaning you're always up to date in the event of a sudden outbreak of the latest online worm. Kaspersky also claims to respond to new threats within two hours of their emergence, several hours faster than its counterparts (though this is difficult to test objectively).

Other features unique to Kaspersky beyond its timeliness: It scans within multiple types of compressed files (not just ZIP but CAB, RAR, and others), includes a rootkit remover, and an anti-spam filter (which even includes an image analyzer that considers the content of images before calling them spam, though I haven't tested this extensively).

The firewall is good but a bit over-aggressive; I eventually had to throttle down the security level after dozens of repeat pop-ups that were perfectly acceptable. Altogether the application is extremely well designed and intuitive, and the features for advanced users are easy to get to. (In fact, their very accessibility may be off-putting to novices who don't want to set the security mode Windows uses when running the program, for example.)

My only real complaint is with pricing: Kaspersky Internet Security is about $66 ($50 for anti-virus only), which is actually considerably more than Norton Internet Security ($60; $36 for anti-virus only). Considering the many free alternatives on the market, this is a tough sell, but if Kaspersky's high-end security features interest you, I definitely recommend the full Internet Security pack, which is a considerably better deal than the Anti-Virus alone.