In the security market since early in the Nineties, Kaspersky Labs is well regarded both on its technical merits and on the completeness of its software. Kaspersky Internet Security 2103 is the latest incarnation of the mid-level product, sitting between the base-level Kaspersky Anti-Virus and the more comprehensive Kaspersky ONE. See also: Group test: what's the best security software?
Having said that, Kaspersky Internet Security 2013 is pretty all-embracing for an IS suite. As well as anti-virus, anti-spam and anti-phishing modules, it includes parental control, a comprehensive firewall, Safe Money and keylogger protection. Safe Money substitutes a secure browser when you're working with your accounts online, while the virtual keyboard encrypts keypresses, so keyloggers can't record what you type. Visit: Security Advisor
The Kaspersky Internet Security 2013 interface is well organised, with a main pane showing the status of your PC above a sliding bar of nine icons, leading to other aspects of the program. There are obviously icons for scanning and updating, including offering schedules for both, but also icons for the virtual keyboard, safe money and a network monitor.
Extra buttons on the main screen lead to a reports screen, showing event statistics for the last day, week, month or year, and settings, which offer very detailed control over all aspects of the application.
When installed under Vista or Windows 7– and under Windows 8, with which Kaspersky Internet Security 2013 is also compatible – there's a Kaspersky Gadget giving quick access to scans and reports. It can also be used as a quick scan facility by simply dragging a suspect file and dropping it on the icon.
We ran a keylogger and typed text with a standard keyboard and with the Kaspersky Internet Security 2013 virtual one, and none of the virtual keyboard strokes was reproduced. This doesn't guarantee all keyloggers will be defeated, but certainly provides some protection.
The program took 1 hour 10 minutes to scan out 50GB test basket of files and examined 349,849 files, giving a scan rate of 583 files/s. This is fast, though the number of files is also higher than with many other programs. A second scan of the same file set took just five minutes and only checked 19,070 files, so the program fingerprints them, to reduce system load.
Our 1GB file copy increased from 41s to 53s when there was also a scan running, an increase of 29 percent, which is low in comparison with most of the competition.
Kaspersky Internet Security: test results
AV-Test (www.av-test.org) has yet to evaluate Kaspersky Internet Security 2013, but the 2012 product scored 16.5/18.0 in its June group test, beaten only by Bitdefender. It scored a perfect 6.0/6.0 for Repair of damaged files after malware attacks, and 5.5/6.0 for Protection. The Protection score represents its handling of zero-day and new threats, where Kaspersky relies on a Cloud-based information network, where new information is quickly shared. It was well above average in this category.
It dropped a full point in the third category, Usability, slowing down AV-Test's platform more, in daily use, than some of its rivals. As mentioned, though, our own tests implied a much lighter system impact, so this may be one of the areas Kaspersky has improved in the new version.
Comments
Dennis said: kaspersky slows down the pc Generates huge log files which does not get deleted and if you delete it does not work and you have to update and this update takes forever and its huge over 150mb It also constantly keeps you internet connection live by accessing kaspersky servers and by sending info to their servers My log files show it can send as 15-20 in 1 second I used to recommend it but not now It drastically slows down the pc
spaceman65 said: This product rendered my PC inoperable I have used Kaspersky since 2009 When it came time for renewal this year I experienced some difficulty in doing so and so called them The transaction was handled quickly by phone and I downloaded the updated version However I found no way to enter the new activation code and was receiving a warning that my subscription was about to expire I called customer service back and was told I would need to run their removal tool to get rid of the previous version Upon doing so following the instructions emailed to me I followed the instruction to reboot Since that time my PC will boot up but the keyboard and mouse are both unresponsive and yes I tried all the usual fixes for that I have tried repeatedly to contact them since but received nothing beyond instructions for submitting a refund request Terrible terrible product and service
CarnivirousParrot said: I recently tried Kaspersly InternetSecurity The biggest problem came when uninstalling it to tryanother product I used the uninstaller provided then searched forhelp on the web found advice on their forums site followedthat Still no go Resorted to the near stone age and used regedit tofind 2 registry entries not cleaned out I think this demonstrates alack of professionalism by the software industry PCAdvisor can help byevaluating the uninstall of any software package they evaluate andrating it for left over registry entries and kilobytes of spaceoccupied after the supplied uninstaller is usedThis is particularly important forsecurity software as during the uninstall the PC is vulnerable
Pakza Moe said: No problems for me so far Maybe u need to update all yo drivers
Roger H said: I have Used Kaspersky for about 4 years I upgraded to Internet Security 2013 from 2012 Immediately my windows 7 laptop began to bluescreen on start up I did 3 clean reinstalls before doing some online research about Kaspersky and discovering that there can be problems with interaction between Kaspersky and display drivers and communications drivers I removed 2013 and went back to 2012 with a 4th clean rebuild and so far it works just fine Kaspersky cant have tested this properly Im going to look at another Internet Security offering