When you install an antivirus utility, there are certain things you expect it to do. It should root out any malware that’s already present on your system, of course. It should stand guard against any future infestations, using a variety of techniques to fend off attacks. Most likely you expect it to help you stay safe from malicious and fraudulent websites by steering your browser away from them. Vipre Antivirus Plus does all those things—some extremely well, and some poorly—but little more.
(Editors’ Note: Vipre is owned by J2 Global, the parent company of PCMag’s publisher, Ziff Davis.)
At $34.99 per year, Vipre is cheaper than the most common antivirus price point, which is roughly $40. It’s also flexible in terms of multi-license pricing, with subscriptions available for three, five, and 10 licenses. A 10-license pack costs $69.99—if you use all 10 licenses that’s a hair under $7 per device. That’s a good deal!
This flexibility contrasts quite a bit with Norton AntiVirus Plus, which costs $59.99 per year for a single license and offers no multi-license pricing. Similarly, Trend Micro also offers a $39.95 one-license antivirus for Windows and Mac; for more licenses you must upgrade to a Trend Micro suite. BullGuard Antivirus costs less, at $29.99 per year, but as with Trend Micro, multi-license subscriptions are available only at the suite level.
At the other end of the scale is McAfee AntiVirus Plus, which costs $59.99 per year. That’s a little more than Vipre’s five-license price, but a McAfee subscription has no limits. It lets you install protection on every Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS device in your household. Still, compared with most products, Vipre costs a little less than average and offers serious pricing flexibility.
Getting Vipre installed is a snap. Launch the installer, enter the product key, click one button to agree and install, and sit back. Like BullGuard Antivirus, Vipre updates its antivirus definitions quickly and automatically right after installation.
Vipre’s main window is a study in minimalism, with a status panel that shows the last scan, last update, and scheduled next scan. A menu across the top offers the options MyVIPRE, Account, and Manage. The color scheme is up to you. The default is gray and dark gray with pops of tan and mint green, but from the Account page you can select three other dark schemes and three with lighter backgrounds.
A Brief History of Vipre
You may be surprised to learn that Vipre has been around for more than 25 years. Originally published by Sunbelt Software, its name stood for “Virus Intrusion Protection Remediation Engine.” Over the years, the product was bought by GFI and then spun off as a separate company called ThreatTrack. You can still see this history in some of the product’s web pages. For example, if you click a malware notification popup for more information, you come to a page with sunbeltsecurity in the URL and several references to ThreatTrack on the page. More recently, J2 Global, owner of PCMag’s publisher Ziff Davis, acquired Vipre.
Good Lab Results
Independent antivirus testing labs around the world regularly put antivirus products through rigorous testing and report how they fared. We follow four such labs, and Vipre appears in the latest reports from two of those, with good results.
Testing experts at AV-Test Institute rate antivirus products on three criteria: protection, performance, and usability. Here usability means the product doesn’t cause trouble by mistakenly flagging legitimate apps and websites as dangerous. A product can take six points in each category, for a maximum total of 18.
Vipre achieved a perfect 18 points in the latest test from this lab. So did nine other products, among them F-Secure, Norton, and Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security.
AV-Comparatives eschews numeric results in its many reports. Any product that passes a test gets Standard certification. Those that go beyond the minimum can earn Advanced or even Advanced+ certification. We follow three tests from this busy lab.
About half of recently tested products, Vipre among them, earned Advanced+ in the latest real-world test, which lets products apply all available components to defend against malware attack. In a test measuring how little each product affected performance, Vipre, along with nearly all others, also earned Advanced+.
The AV-Comparatives Malware Protection Test starts by letting each antivirus wipe out static samples using signature-based detection. After that initial culling, the testers launch each remaining sample to allow such features as behavioral detection to kick in. Vipre would have earned an Advanced rating, but a slew of false positives knocked it down to Standard.
Bitdefender, G Data, Kaspersky, and three others managed a trifecta in the latest tests from this lab, earning Advanced+ in all three.
Vipre doesn’t show up in the latest tests from SE Labs or MRG-Effitas, but with results from two labs we can still calculate an aggregate lab score. On that basis, Vipre rates 9.5 points, which is pretty good.
Note, though, that the real heavy hitters show up in results from all four labs. Among that group, Kaspersky is at the top, with a perfect 10 points. Avast and Norton come next in the all-labs group, with 9.8 and 9.5 points, respectively. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, ESET, and G Data matched Avast’s 9.8 points, but with results from just three labs.
Scans and Schedules
Vipre offers the expected Quick, Full, and Custom scans. On a standard clean test system, Vipre finished a full scan in 100 minutes, a good bit slower than the current average of 67 minutes. Vipre’s RapidScan technology speeds subsequent scans by skipping known safe files, much like similar tech in ESET, Kaspersky, and Bitdefender. A repeat scan with Vipre finished in 16 minutes. Regardless of the time required, we always recommend running a full scan right after antivirus installation, to boot out any lurking malware.
Out of the box, Vipre schedules a daily quick scan and a weekly full scan. You can edit the launch time and days of the week for these or add your own scheduled scans. Note that RapidScan isn’t enabled by default for scheduled scans; you’ll probably want to turn it on.
Mixed Malware Protection Scores
In addition to consulting the latest lab reports, we always perform hands-on malware protection testing. Doing so provides a different view of the product and provides experience with the product’s capabilities. And of course, when the labs don’t offer any scores these tests are all we have to work with.
Like many competitors, Vipre started wiping out samples the moment they became visible in Windows Explorer. For each quarantined threat, it displayed a message saying, “We blocked a threat from opening. Its category was .” It used the same “Virus.Generic” category for almost every sample, including all the ransomware samples, though in a few cases it reported the category Malware or Potentially Unwanted Program (PUP).
Looking in Quarantine, we found that it listed more detailed malware names, such as MSIL.Ransomware.Jigsaw and Win32.Ramnit.N. However, clicking those names for details got nothing but the same handful of generic descriptions for virus, adware, PUP, and malware. Most users won’t even look at quarantine, much less dig in to learn about what Vipre caught. For us, the uninformative descriptions proved disappointing.
Vipre caught almost 80% of the samples on sight. We launched those that remained and carefully noted how Vipre handled them (or didn’t). In a couple cases, it detected the malware installer after launch but didn’t prevent it from dropping one or more executable files. Overall, it detected 83 percent of the samples and scored 8.0 of 10 possible points, which is quite low (though better than the 7.7 points it earned when last reviewed).
On the other hand, Bitdefender didn’t do a lot better, with 8.6 points against this malware collection. When our results don’t jibe with the labs, we defer to the greater resources that the labs can bring to bear, especially when a product’s scores are both high and plentiful.
At the other end of the scale, Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus detected 100 percent of the samples and scored a perfect 10 points. G Data came in second, with 9.8 points. Microsoft Windows Defender Security Center also took 9.8 points, but that was in a test using our previous collection of malware samples.
Collecting, curating, and analyzing samples for that hands-on test is a time-consuming process, so we don’t change them out more than once a year. For a take on how each product handles the very latest threats, we use a feed of malware-hosting URLs from MRG-Effitas. Typically, these are no more than a few days old. We launch each URL, discard any duds, and record whether the antivirus blocked access to the URL, pulped the malware payload, or let the malware download proceed unhindered.
Before running this test, we turned on Vipre’s Edge Protection, which “Stops exploits and other online threats from being downloaded by most web browsers.” It’s not clear why this isn’t enabled by default. We recommend flipping the switch to On.
For about three quarters of the test URLs, Vipre diverted the browser to a lengthy page announcing that it blocked access to the website, along with a detailed explanation for how to report a site blocked in error, and how to rescue such a site for immediate access. We doubt many users will read that verbose page, but it did serve to reveal that Edge Protection handled about a quarter of the detections.
In almost every case where Vipre didn’t suppress loading of the malware-hosting page, its real-time protection halted the file download immediately, with a slide-in explanation. One way or another, it achieved 97% protection. That puts it in the winner’s circle, for sure, but it’s a small step down from its score of 100% when last tested. McAfee currently holds that 100% score, while Bitdefender, G Data, and Sophos managed 99%.
Poor Phishing Protection
After that impressive performance blocking malware-hosting URLs, we hoped for something similar in the antiphishing test. Alas, our hopes were dashed.
Phishing pages don’t contain any malware as such. Instead of attacking the operating system or apps, they focus on the weakest link: you! A phishing page apes the login page for some sensitive website, from banks and financial sites to dating and gaming sites. If you take the bait and enter your username and password, the fraudster now owns your account. For more on this kind of threat, you should read our piece on How to Avoid Phishing Scams.
For this test, we scrape websites that track phishing frauds and suspected phishing frauds. We use a mix of verified fakes and sites too new to have been verified and blacklisted. We launch each simultaneously in four browsers, one protected by the antivirus under test and the other three relying on protection built into Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. We toss out any URL that doesn’t load correctly in all four browsers, and any that proves not to fit the profile for a true phishing site. With the lengthy testing done, we crunch the numbers.
On detecting a fraudulent site, Vipre replaced it with precisely the same warning message it used for malware-hosting URLs. We didn’t see that page very much, though, as Vipre detected only 35% of the blatant frauds. That’s down from 43% when last tested. In a rare alignment, all three browsers scored 90% detection. The lesson is clear—don’t turn off your browser’s phishing protection if you’re using Vipre.
Of course, the actual phishing URLs differ for each test, but they’re always the freshest samples we can find. In their own tests, F-Secure Anti-Virus and McAfee detected 100% of the fakes. More than a third of recent products detected more than 90% of the phishing frauds. We’d like to see Vipre bring its phishing detection skills up to match its capable detection of malware-hosting URLs.
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Secure File Eraser
When you delete a file in Windows, it’s not actually gone; you can still pull it back out of the Recycle Bin. Even if you empty the Bin, or bypass it, the file’s data remains on disk until overwritten, and can be recovered using the right software. Windows itself now has this file recovery capability. But what if you want to get rid of a sensitive document so thoroughly that even forensic software can’t get it back?
Vipre has you covered. Click Manage, click Privacy, and turn on the Secure File Eraser feature. This adds a secure erasure right-click menu item for files and folders. When you use this feature, Vipre overwrites each file’s data before deletion, thus foiling forensic recovery tools. Unlike some other secure deletion components, it doesn’t let you adjust the number of passes overwriting data, but unless you’re hiding data from the NSA that probably doesn’t matter.
When last reviewed, the Privacy page also served to invoke Vipre’s history cleaner tool. We zinged it for being seriously outdated. At the time, my contacts explained that a standalone privacy tool was in the works, and that the history cleaner would vanish on release of that tool. That has happened. There’s no more history cleaner in the antivirus, and you can get Vipre Privacy Shield as a standalone product or as part of Vipre’s Ultimate Security bundle.
Does the Job, But not Much More
Despite the Plus in its name, Vipre Antivirus Plus is a bare-bones antivirus. It handles all the basics and little more. The labs that include it for testing give it good scores. However, in our own tests its scores range from excellent to dismal. Unless you’ve been a dedicated fan of Vipre since its inception 25 years ago, you should probably choose something else.
Bitdefender Antivirus Plus and Kaspersky Anti-Virus lead the field in test results from independent labs and excel in our own phishing protection test. McAfee AntiVirus Plus beat Vipre’s excellent score against malicious downloads, and it protects every device in your household. With its journal-and-rollback handling of unknown files Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus can even roll back ransomware activity. All four of these Editors’ Choice-winning programs cost more than Vipre, but they’re worth the price.
