F-Secure Internet Security 2005 review

F-Secure Internet Security 2005 is a suite of utilities designed to protect your PC from hackers, viruses, spam and other Internet nasties.

It contains five main pieces of software: antivirus, anti-spyware, anti-spam, a firewall and parental controls. With the exception of the anti-spyware, a re-branded version of Lavasoft's Ad-Aware Professional, all of the suite's utilities are integrated into one easy-to-use program.

The clean and logical interface makes getting to, and changing, the settings very easy. It's a shame that F-Secure has not done more to link its Anti-Spyware program in with the others, and if you don't notice its icon in the Start menu you might not realise it's there at all. It's a good program to have, though, and essential to your PC security toolkit.

The firewall is easy to use and unobtrusive. Instead of firing off alerts every few minutes, it quietly blocks and records attempts by hackers (or automated hacking tools) to probe your PC. The results are saved in a log for you to view later. You can choose to see pop-up alerts if you want, but it's inadvisable. In our tests, we found that a simple port scan caused the program to report that it was being attacked by various worms. It blocks it all anyway, so it's not a real problem, but if you tell the program to show you pop-ups every time your PC's virtual ports are probed you'll never have any peace.

As well as blocking attempts to access your computer from outside, you can also tell the firewall to control which programs are allowed to access the Internet from the PC. This is useful as it stops any viruses or spyware that have snuck past the anti-virus software from dialling out to communicate with their evil masters. Gamers will need this if they want to run a games server on their PC.

The anti-spam software works in the background, intercepting incoming mail, and tries to filter out the spam from genuine messages. We tested it with more than 3,000 messages, 869 of which were real and the rest being adverts for Rolex watches and so on. With the default settings, the software filtered out 57 per cent of the spam, sending it directly to Outlook Express' Deleted Items folder. Only four real messages were incorrectly classified as spam. Unfortunately, just over 1,000 spam messages still ended up in our in box, so 43 per cent of the spam got through. Currently we'd recommend using the free SpamPal utility from www.spampal.org, which is more effective.

The Parental Control cleverly intercepts Web addresses requested by your browser and allows or blocks them. It's more effective than a simple Web site blocker, and will even stop you searching search engines like Google for phrases likely to result in explicit content.

The anti-virus software is identical to F-Secure Anti-Virus 2005, which we reviewed in the February issue. It is extremely effective at finding and blocking viruses and Trojans, and is great value at £26 inc VAT. Comparing this with the full price of Internet Security 2005 shows that even if the other utilities were average, this would be a good buy.

With the exception of the lack-lustre anti-spam software, this is a very strong bundle that is worth the asking price of £38.95. Its annual renewal fee of £19.50 is also very reasonable. But if you're already using a free version of ZoneAlarm firewall, and don't need parental control software, you would get best value for money by buying F-Secure Anti-Virus 2005 and installing the free SpamPal anti-spam package.