Steganos Internet Security 2006 review

Steganos has rebranded and bundled two Kaspersky products to make this security suite.

The programs are not integrated in the way the utilities in other suites are. The firewall is a rebranded version of Kaspersky Anti-Hacker, which Kaspersky has just stopped selling as a standalone firewall. The anti-virus program won a Budget Buy award in our anti-virus lab test in June 2006, but can the firewall live up to its partner?

The installation procedure doesn't disable Windows' firewall and comes with its auto-blocking setting turned on and set to 60 minutes. We disabled both. By default the main window pops up when an attack occurs, and you can see an attack's details listed. You can turn this off so the program deals with the probes silently, which we recommend. Once it's set up to your liking the program handles your internet connection effectively.

Our attempts to connect to the mail, file transfer and web ports caused the firewall to show an alert. Blocking all but the web service, and using the Customize option, allowed access to the IIS web server and blocked access to its other parts.

Strangely our port scans showed that the FTP and SMTP ports were also open, as well as the website's, even though we couldn't connect to them. We saw this odd behaviour in an older version of the firewall last year. This means that, although an attacker might think your ports are open, any intrusion attempts will be blocked. The IDS detected some of our web server probes.

This firewall is easy to use and comes with some advanced features and an unbeatable anti-virus scanner. The whole bundle is great value.