CA Internet Security Suite 2007 Home Protection Pack review

This suite provides anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-spam software as well as a firewall and a backup program.

We were impressed when, within seconds of being installed, it told us a suspicious program was trying to access the Internet. Impressed, but a little surprised, since we'd installed it on a fresh PC that had never previously been connected to the Internet or had any software installed. We wiped the PC again and re-installed CA Internet Security. The same file magically reappeared. Yes, the program was identifying its own components as malware.

To test the anti-virus and anti-spyware modules, we infected a PC with a dozen samples of recent malware and let CA Security loose. It didn't do badly, finding all but one of the malicious files. However, it couldn't remove one of the viruses (a variant of iflar) and had to put it in quarantine instead. Another piece of spyware it claimed to have cleaned (AdRotator F) kept coming back again and again, which was tiresome.

CA Anti-Spam had a few teething troubles. Having clicked on the button marked Setup Wizard, we were told the wizard would start the next time we opened Outlook. The next time we opened Outlook it crashed, with an error message blaming 'qurb outlook add-in'. This turned out to be CA Anti-Spam. We tried again, and this time Outlook wouldn't open at all. On the third attempt, Outlook opened, but with no setup wizard.

The tutorial said we could alternatively set up the anti-spam tool from the anti-spam toolbar in Outlook. There was no anti-spam toolbar.

CA's firewall is fairly comprehensive. It monitors inbound and outbound traffic for suspicious activity, alerts you if something odd is going on, and asks your permission whenever a program accesses the Internet for the first time. You can exercise as much or as little control as you want. First-timers can simply say which applications should be allowed to connect, while experts can specify how the software should handle individual ports and protocols. The firewall also comes with a 'safe', normally something you get with a privacy filter. This allows you to specify information that you definitely don't want sent over the Internet (your address and bank details, for instance), so if the kids start entering your Barclays number in response to that nice man from the Nigerian shipping company, the software should intervene.

Safe from Scunthorpe

If you do have kids in the house, you should also be fairly pleased with CA Security's parental controls. These allow you to specify what a particular user can and can't do on the Internet. For the most part this worked fine: we couldn't look up naughty websites, but the software still allowed us to access educational sites about breast cancer, so it wasn't indiscriminate. Oddly, though, if we looked up Scunthorpe from the Internet Explorer 7 search bar, CA Security blocked the search. When we went to google.com and searched for Scunthorpe, it left us alone. It should make up its mind.

The Website Inspector is a toolbar that checks the security certificate of each site you visit. It worked fine. Finally, there's the Desktop DNA Migrator, a weird name for a backup program that copies all your Windows and program settings to a file from which they can be restored to your PC later or transferred to another. Handy.

On paper this looks like a formidable security suite. In reality, while there are lots of good bits, it has no really outstanding features and one or two fairly serious flaws.

Author: Karl Wright