How many desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones exist in your household? Can you even count them? They all need antivirus protection, especially the PCs and Androids. Even the more inherently secure macOS and iOS devices can’t protect data in transit—they need a VPN, for sure. McAfee Total Protection lets you install security on every device in your household. With so many suite-level features included in McAfee’s cross-platform antivirus, Total Protection needs to add a lot to impress, and it does. Cross-platform password management, no-limits VPN protection, identity monitoring, identity theft insurance—this suite has a lot to offer. Its components aren’t all perfect, but with protection for every device, it’s truly comprehensive.
How Much Does McAfee Total Protection Cost?
McAfee has long been famed for its unlimited licensing practices, but you can also choose smaller packages. I don’t know why you’d buy this, but for $84.99 per year you can get a Single license, protecting one measly device. That also gives you a single VPN license. At the Basic level, $104.99 per year gets you licenses to protect five devices, along with five VPN licenses. Things start to look good at the Pro level, where a $124.99 subscription lets you protect “10+” devices (meaning all devices in your household) and adds the Safe Kids parental control system. Finally, the $159.99 Ultimate edition goes beyond identity monitoring, adding Identity Theft Insurance. Given that an Ultimate license costs less than twice the price of a Single license, it’s clearly the best deal—if you have a lot of devices to protect.
McAfee’s pricing looks good compared to the competition, too. It’s true that a five-license Basic subscription costs five bucks more than five licenses for Avast, ESET, or Kaspersky, but none of those companies let you opt for unlimited licenses. To get unlimited Norton 360 with LifeLock licenses, you’d have to choose the Ultimate Plus tier, at $349.99 per year. Admittedly, this also gets you top-level LifeLock support, 500GB of storage for your online backups, and unlimited VPN licenses. Even at the Ultimate level, McAfee gives just five VPN licenses.
Panda is one of the few other companies to offer a no-limits solution. At the $334.99 pricing tier, you can install Panda Dome Premium on all your Windows, macOS, and Android devices. However, that doesn’t include VPN or identity monitoring. McAfee clearly remains a bargain. Provided, again, that your household includes plenty of devices needing protection.
You don’t want your antivirus protection to end abruptly, so opting for auto-renewal is smart. McAfee contacts you before the automatic renewal kicks in, giving you a chance to opt out. Auto-renewal also comes with significant benefits. For one, it activates McAfee’s Virus Protection Pledge. If malware gets past the antivirus, McAfee’s fearless virus hunters will remote-control your computer and eradicate it manually, a service that would normally cost $89.95. In the rare event they fail at their efforts, McAfee will refund the price of the product. Auto-renewal also lifts stringent bandwidth limitations on the VPN, which is quite a deal. With Bitdefender Total Security, Kaspersky, and others, you pay a separate monthly fee for no-limits VPN protection. Finally, enrolling in auto-renewal unlocks the full power of McAfee’s personal information monitoring.
Simple Installation
As with McAfee’s antivirus, you start by activating your registration code online. At that point, you can either immediately install it on the device you’re using or send links to install on other devices. When you download the product, you get a serial number, distinct from your activation code. Hang onto that number, as you might need it to reinstall the product.
At the time of my last review, McAfee had completely redesigned the suite’s interface to reflect a new emphasis on helping you do what you want easily and smoothly, without security worries. This new interface has made its way to McAfee AntiVirus Plus on Windows, and it’s scheduled to roll out for mobile devices in a month or so. As for the Mac, well, a makeover is in the plans, but it’s not a priority.
The airy main window points out three types of protection, PC, Web, and Identity, each represented by a large panel. Across the top you get advice and suggestions for improving security, much like the AutoPilot recommendations from Bitdefender. A Quick Action button at the bottom lets you scan for malware, turn on the VPN, or quickly scrub personal data from your system.
To complete your setup, follow the prompts to install McAfee’s WebAdvisor in Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. When I last evaluated this product the spam filter and encryption system weren’t installed until first use; now they’re fully integrated. Safe Family parental control remains a separate download, which makes sense given that many people don’t want or need parental control.
Orderly User Interface
McAfee’s interface is very orderly. Each of the three category buttons opens a new page, and each page displays four features related to that category. Click PC and you get panels for Antivirus, Firewall, Secure apps, and App Boost. On the Web page there’s Browser Security, Web Boost, Tracker remover, and Secure VPN. And for Identity, you see ID protection, Password Manager, File Shredder, and File lock. If you notice some inconsistency in the use of capital letters in the feature names, that’s in the product, not a typo.
Not all features fit into this well-ordered grid. You can reach additional components by clicking the Settings gear at top right. Here you’ll find the home network analyzer, the spam filter, the parental control system, and more.
Shared Antivirus Features
Of course, everything you get as part of McAfee AntiVirus Plus is also present in the full suite. In fact, the two products look very similar, the main difference being added buttons in the full suite. Below is a synopsis of my findings on the antivirus, but for details you can read my full review.
All four independent labs I follow include McAfee in their testing. Along with all but one other product, McAfee takes top marks from SE Labs in its latest report. While it misses perfection by one-half point in AV-Test’s three-part evaluation, its total of 17.5 points earn it the title Top Product. Out of the three AV-Comparatives tests I follow, McAfee takes the best rating (Advanced+) in two and earns Advanced in the third. Its only real stumble comes in the tough testing applied by MRG-Effitas. With this lab, you either ace the test or fail, and McAfee fails this time.
I use an algorithm that maps lab results onto a 10-point scale and returns an aggregate score. McAfee earns a 9.1-point aggregate score, which is not bad. Looking at other products tested by all four labs, Avira scores the same as McAfee, while Norton and Kaspersky top the list with 9.6 and 9.9 points, respectively. Bitdefender, tested by just three of the four, scores 9.8 aggregate points.
In my own hands-on malware protection tests, I observed that McAfee doesn’t scan files just because Windows Explorer accesses them for display. Rather, it waits until they try to launch and quarantines any that prove to be malware. It detected 100% of our samples and earned 9.9 of 10 possible points. Only Malwarebytes Premium, with a perfect 10, has done better against this collection of samples. McAfee’s near-perfect 9.9 also beats out all products tested with my previous set of samples.
Challenged with a collection of 100 active malware-hosting URLs, McAfee used two techniques to defend the test system. Its WebAdvisor browser plugin prevented the browser from even visiting 37% of the URLs, and it eliminated the malware payloads during download for the rest, earning a perfect 100% protection rate. Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition also blocked 100% in its latest tests, while a half-dozen others came close with 99%.
WebAdvisor also steers users away from phishing sites, those fraudulent sites that pose as banks, finance sites, and even dating sites with the purpose of stealing your login credentials. In testing with 100 very new phishing sites, McAfee achieved 100% protection, a perfect score shared with F-Secure Safe.
WebAdvisor warns you when it detects tech support scams, sites that try to trick you into letting them remote-control your PC. As always, it marks up search results to help you avoid dangerous ones. Do note that if you want it to mark results other than those from its own Safe Search engine, you must tweak the settings. WebAdvisor also marks up links in LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit.
WebAdvisor’s cryptojacking blocker rats out websites that suck up your PCs computational power to mine for Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. This can be legitimate, if the site informs visitors that they’re paying in CPU cycles rather than by viewing ads, so the blocker includes an option to exempt user-specified sites from blocking.
Ransom Guard adds a layer of protection against ransomware. When it detects a whiff of illegitimate “file transformation,” it backs up files that might be affected. If that whiff matures into evidence of a ransomware attack, it quarantines the attacker and restores the files. Because turning off ordinary antivirus protection also turns off Ransom Guard, I couldn’t test its ability to handle zero-day ransomware.
Other Shared Features
McAfee Antivirus Plus contains a surprising number of features that go beyond merely protecting against malware, including a variety of performance-enhancing components. Clicking the PC panel on the home page gets you access to the antivirus, of course, but also to an integrated firewall, unusual for a nominally standalone antivirus.
The firewall component both protects against outside attacks and keeps programs from misusing your network connection. By default, it handles program control internally, which is much better than entrusting that task to the untutored user. Since my last review, McAfee has removed the firewall’s Intrusion Protection system; in any case, I was never able to goad that system into action. The firewall mostly stood up to direct attack test, though I managed to disable a few of its Windows services, including WebAdvisor, using techniques available to a malware coder.
Also on the PC protection page are Secure Apps and App Boost. Clicking Secure Apps brings up a vulnerability scanner that seeks out missing security patches for Windows and popular programs and, when possible, automates the update process. App Boost speeds up the loading of common programs, diverts extra resources to the foreground program, and looks for processes that could work better if given more resources. The components on this page are the same in the antivirus and in McAfee Total Protection.
Clicking for Web protection in the antivirus opens a page with three panels, Browser Security, Web Boost, and Tracker remover. The Browser Security panel just brings you to the web-related page of McAfee’s security report. Despite its general-purpose sounding name, Web Boost has exactly one function—it pauses auto-playing videos on web pages, but only in Chrome. Tracker remover is another name for the QuickClean component, which clears out files that waste disk space and items such as cookies that sites could use to track you.
In the standalone antivirus, the Identity protection page is something of a disappointment. It offers just one component, the File Shredder. By securely deleting sensitive files with the File Shredder, you make it impossible for anyone to recover them using forensic software or (if you choose the Complete shred type) forensic hardware.
A couple of important features aren’t on any of the three main protection pages. Instead, you reach them through the menu. Clicking Protect more devices brings up a page that lists all the devices associated with your subscription and lets you easily add more. For mobile devices you just scan a QR code on the page. You can also send an install link via email or SMS. At the very bottom of the menu is Protect home network, which brings up the My Network page. On this page you can view all devices connected to your network. Windows devices with McAfee installed display an icon showing that they’re protected. A trust system that used to let you remotely monitor and control other McAfee-equipped Windows boxes is not functional at present.
Security protection for non-Windows devices is the same whether you’re subscribed for the antivirus or the full suite, though several of the suite’s added features offer mobile apps. On a Mac, it effectively installs McAfee AntiVirus Plus (for Mac), the only difference being that the window title reads McAfee Total Protection. Please read that review for an in-depth account. The Mac edition managed 100% protection against phishing attacks, just like the Windows edition.
The Android edition is a full-featured security suite, with Android antivirus, antitheft, app privacy checking, and more. Those using iOS don’t get as much—secure storage for photos, backup for contacts, a collection of anti-theft features, and safe browsing using a Proxy VPN. If you had to pay for each license, installing on iOS would be a waste, but if you chose a subscription with no limit on devices you might as well install it. I did notice that upgrading to McAfee Total Protection on both iOS and VPN added an integrated VPN component under the name Wi-Fi Guard.
See How We Test Security SoftwareSee How We Test Security Software
No-Limits VPN Protection
A security suite protects your data on your devices, but when that data heads for the jungle of the internet it’s vulnerable. Running your connection through a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, secures the data while it’s in transit. The connection is encrypted between your device and the VPN server, so even if you’ve connected through a compromised Wi-Fi network your data is safe. A VPN also serves to mask your IP address, so nobody can track you or determine your (approximate) location using that address.
When McAfee acquired TunnelBear, that acquisition came with the VPN server network of the popular TunnelBear VPN, a PCMag Editors’ Choice pick for VPN protection. McAfee’s Safe Connect VPN, available as a separate application for $7.99 per month, is built on the same technology, but without animated bears. For users of McAfee Total Protection, the VPN is fully integrated with the main suite, appearing on the page of Web protection features.
When you connect to a server using TunnelBear, an animated bear visibly tunnels to the location on the on-screen map. The more sedate Safe Connect simply reports when you’re connected, but the effect is the same. Your data travels in encrypted form to the server you’ve chosen. Since my last review, McAfee’s coverage has expanded from 22 countries to 50, and has expanded its reach to Africa and the Middle East. In testing, I only counted 46 countries, but admittedly the country selector is awkward, showing only three countries at a time.
Note that McAfee’s VPN imposes a strict bandwidth limit on those who haven’t signed up for auto-renewal. You can still pick from any of the available server locations, but you’re limited to 500MB of bandwidth per month. Just go ahead and allow auto-renewal. You can always cancel it when you get the email warning that renewal is coming up.
Running all your internet activity through a VPN company’s servers requires that you trust that company not to misuse your data. We look closely at the privacy policy for each VPN, hoping to see that they retain little or no information and have sensible policies in place to handle requests for information from law enforcement. In the past we’ve admired TunnelBear’s clear and appropriate policy. Safe Connect falls under McAfee’s all-product privacy policy, which is significantly more verbose and seems (to our non-legally trained minds) less focused on keeping customer data private.
Quite a few TunnelBear features didn’t make it into Safe Connect. Among these are: GhostBear, which disguises VPN traffic as HTML traffic, for situations where VPN use is blocked; Vigilant Mode protection for your connection during the moments between an accidental disconnect and restored connection; and Blocker, an advanced ad-blocking browser extension.
There’s just one major choice on the Settings page and that involves when Safe Connect connects. By default, it waits for you to connect manually, but you can have it kick in automatically any time you’re connected, or any time you’re using Wi-Fi. There’s also an option to define trusted Wi-Fi networks where VPN protection isn’t required.
Why would you not use VPN protection when it’s available without bandwidth limits? The most likely reason is speed. When you connect through a VPN your traffic necessarily travels farther and passes through more servers. The time from when your device sends a query to when it receives acknowledgment (called latency) tends to be longer, which can be a problem for gamers. More universally problematic is the fact that using a VPN can slow downloading or uploading of data.
At PCMag, we use the Ookla speedtest tool to gauge the impact a VPN has on performance. We have a whole feature on how we test VPNs, so do read it for more on our methodology and the limits of our tests.
(Editors’ Note: Ookla is owned by PCMag’s publisher, Ziff Davis.)
See How We Test VPNsSee How We Test VPNs
When we last tested Safe Connect, we determined that it increased latency by 40.8%. That’s better than the current median of about 52%. In our latest VPN speed tests, NordVPN had no effect on latency, and HMA VPN apparently decreased it.
As for upload speed and the all-important download speed, Safe Connect didn’t do well. Downloads ran 91.2% slower when routed through Safe Connect, and uploads went 90.9% slower. Both those figures are roughly double the median. Note, though, that speed shouldn’t be the only factor in your choice of a VPN, since speed effects can vary by network and by location.
We also checked to confirm that the VPN successfully masked the originating IP address and ISP name, and that it didn’t leak DNS information. As for streaming Netflix, perhaps to see BBC original content before its US release, it’s hard to say. At the time of this review, we had no trouble logging into a UK server and watching BBC content over Netflix. But at the time of our last review Safe Connect wasn’t one of the VPNs that work with Netflix. This is a fluid situation.
With ever-growing interest in VPN usage, many security companies have started adding VPN protection to their top-tier security suites. Alas, in many cases what you get is a severely feature-limited version. Typically, you get a skimpy allowance of bandwidth per day, and you must accept whatever server the VPN chooses for you. Bitdefender and Kaspersky fit this model, offering feature-limited VPN components powered by Hotspot Shield, with a significant added subscription price to lift those limits.
Safe Connect doesn’t have the advanced features and settings that a VPN expert would likely want, but it’s very easy to use, and it comes without the painful limitations imposed in some competing suites. It adds significant value to this security suite. As noted, Symantec’s Norton suite products all include a no-limits VPN, too. And where McAfee limits you to five devices even at its top tier, Norton gives you five, 10, or unlimited devices, depending on the tier.
McAfee Safe Family
Parental control isn’t a feature integrated with this suite. Rather, your subscription gives you a license to install the separate McAfee Safe Family, a modern, cross-platform parental control utility, though one that still has its limitations. Please read our review for full details on the product; I’ll briefly run down its features here. On the one hand, Safe Family costs $49.99 per year as a standalone, so getting it with your security suite seems like a good deal. On the other hand, we found several reasons to rate this product just 2.5 stars.
You install Safe Family as a parent on at least one Windows, Android, or iOS device; sorry, there’s no support for macOS. Then you gather the children’s devices and install it in child mode on each of those, identifying which child uses each device. There’s no limit on the number of child profiles or devices. Unlike most parental control utilities, Safe Family doesn’t let you assign different Windows user accounts to different profiles; this could be a deal-breaker.
Safe Family can block access to 16 content categories, and it initially chooses categories for blocking based on the child’s age; parents can fine-tune this selection. When Safe Family blocks a page, the browser just displays an error message, typically error 400, “Bad Request”. Safe Family itself pops up a big window explaining that the site is blocked. If your child thinks that’s a mistake, there’s a button to ask permission for access. However, unlike most similar products the content filter is not browser-independent. All your child needs is an off-brand browser to evade the filter; we found that Brave did the job. That makes the content filter effectively useless. McAfee can’t filter content on iOS devices, so it includes instructions for using Apple’s built-in content filtering system.
On all three platforms, Safe Family can block use of specific apps. For Windows, it lists known applications, including obscure ones, and lets parents prevent access to any of them, or set a daily time limit for usage. However, I found that oddball items like my hand-coded test programs didn’t appear, so app control is limited. My McAfee contact confirmed that the system doesn’t scan for all executable apps, but rather looks for apps found in locations such as the start menu. On the other hand, McAfee successfully prevented simple workarounds like moving or renaming a blocked program.
On Android, parents can block apps by type, for example “Game Casino,” or on an individual basis. For iOS devices, Safe Family leverages the built-in iOS ability to block apps based on age. By default, it disallows in-app purchases; parents can also ban installing new apps.
Parents can control when each kid is allowed screen time. By default, Safe Family sets a time span for weekdays and for weekends; parents can change those spans or add custom allowed times. On mobile devices, essential services like phoning home remain available even outside permitted screen times. Parents can also hit pause, suspending all device use for a child; here, too, essential mobile services remain available. I almost missed the Pause feature, as it’s invoked by a tiny icon overlaid on the child’s picture.
Like the Safe Kids parental control system included with Kaspersky Security Cloud, among others, Safe Family lets you track the location of your children’s devices and define known places. In testing, it correctly sent notifications when a device under its watchful eye entered and left PCMag’s offices.
Qustodio, Norton Family Premier, and most other cross-platform parental control systems use an online console to let parents monitor kids and adjust configuration. With Safe Family, parents must use the parent app. From that app, parents can see all recent activity, view alerts, and check the child’s location.
Safe Family has other limitations. As noted, content filtering isn’t browser independent. It protects itself against removal on Android, but on Windows and iOS all it can do is notify you that the child uninstalled it. You can’t remove a device from tracking without removing the entire corresponding child profile. Its overly large, non-resizable window may not even fit some laptop screens. If parental control is something you need from your security suite, Kaspersky or Norton would be a better choice.
Anti-Spam as Needed
At the time of my last review, the anti-spam component wasn’t installed until you tried to use it. Currently it’s both installed and enabled by default. To configure this component, click the gear icon for settings, scroll all the way to the bottom, and select it.
Most users can just turn off this feature. If you use a web-based email system, the service provider filters out spam, and such services are quite effective. Your work email probably has spam filtered out at the server level. Those who need a local spam filter are a dwindling group, but if you are a member of this set, McAfee has a lot to offer.
McAfee’s spam filter integrates with Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird. In these email clients, it adds a handy toolbar and automatically diverts spam messages to their own folder. You can still use it if you’ve found you prefer another third-party email client, but you’ll have to define a message rule to direct the spam. McAfee filters spam from POP3 and Exchange email accounts, though it doesn’t handle IMAP accounts in your email client the way Kaspersky and some others do.
In an unusual twist, McAfee can reach into your webmail accounts to filter out spam. When this feature first came out, it was impressive. Years later, most webmail services do a fine job of filtering spam internally, and it’s just not necessary. And you do have to give McAfee your email password. If you choose to use it, you can view messages filtered out of your webmail stream from within the McAfee application and, if necessary, rescue any valid mail back to your online inbox.
There are quite a few options for configuring the spam filter. To start, there are five levels of protection, from Minimal, which allows more spam but doesn’t throw away valid mail, to Restricted, which blocks all messages unless the sender is on your Friends list. I’d advise leaving it set to the default Balanced level.
You can define custom spam filtering rules, but I can’t imagine why any user would take the time to do this. The Friends list identifies addresses or domains that should always reach the Inbox. You can manually edit this list, add friends from the email client toolbar, or add all your contacts to the Friends list. There’s also an option to automatically block messages written using character sets for languages you don’t speak.
If you do need spam filtering at the local level, McAfee can handle it. Where many products limit protection to POP3 accounts, McAfee can filter Exchange accounts and even pull spam from your webmail. If you don’t need it, just turn it off.
True Key Password Manager
Your McAfee Total Protection subscription also gets you premium access to the True Key password manager. In fact, you get five licenses for True Key, so five individuals in your household can each have their own personal password manager. And each of those users can install True Key on all their Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS devices. Please read our review for the nitty-gritty on this product.
You’ll find a Password Manager panel on McAfee’s Identity protection page, but that doesn’t mean this component lives within the suite. When you click that panel, it sends you to the web to initialize and configure True Key.
True Key syncs nicely across devices, and supports a dazzling array of multifactor authentication options, including email verification, trusted device management, master password, fingerprint recognition, Windows Hello, and Apple Face ID. You can even reset a lost master password using multiple other authentication factors. With almost all other password managers, losing your master password means you’ve lost all your data.
True Key’s multifactor authentication system works nicely, and it handles standard password manager functions, but it lacks advanced features found in the best competing products. There’s no secure password sharing, password inheritance, or automated password updating. It doesn’t even fill personal data into web forms. Getting it free as part of this suite is great; if you paid for five licenses individually, they’d cost $99.95 per year. But you can do better by choosing one of our Editors’ Choice password managers.
File Lock End of Life
Like similar features in Bitdefender and Kaspersky, McAfee’s File Lock creates encrypted storage “vaults” to hold your sensitive files. But it’s on the way out. Don’t use File Lock. If you’re already using it to protect important files, get your files out while you still can. When you open this feature from McAfee’s Identity protection page, you see the slightly garbled message, “File lock is up for EOL by Feb 2022. Back up files to a safe location in your local to avoid risk of losing them.” Here EOL stands for end of life, meaning the feature won’t exist anymore.
The only legitimate reason for this feature’s continued presence is to let current users pull out their files. There’s no excuse for letting people create new encrypted vaults that will self-destruct in a few months. And yet, McAfee allows just that. The component is visibly outdated, and its internal text refers to a version of Total Protection that’s a couple of years old. Even when File Lock was in McAfee’s good graces, it had problems. For example, initialization required answering three security questions of the sort that bad guys could solve by research, and once selected, your answers couldn’t be changed. Just leave this component alone.
McAfee Protection Center
When you click Identity from the home page, you see panels representing four identity-related features, ID Protection, Password Manager, File Shredder, and the doomed File Lock. Identity protection is the hot topic here, and getting the most from it will take a little time.
Clicking to set up identity protection opens the Protection Center online. Setup starts with a short slideshow about just how the service works. Next, the service checks your account email against “dark web forums and marketplaces”. After an initial on-demand check, it continues monitoring that account, but only after you type in an emailed verification code.
My McAfee contacts point out that information about breaches comes from their own research, not from widely available sites like HaveIBeenPwned. They estimate this gets notifications to users as much as 10 months faster.
At this point the full Protection Center page opens and invites you to add more information for monitoring. You can add:
- 10 email addresses,
- One Social Security Number,
- One date of birth,
- 10 phone numbers,
- 10 credit and debit cards,
- 10 bank accounts,
- Two driver’s licenses,
- Two passports,
- Two tax IDs, and
- Two health IDs.
For each email address, it requires entry of an emailed verification code. Likewise, you verify each phone number with a texted code. If you fill in the maximum in every category, you’ll have McAfee monitoring 60 distinct pieces of PII (personally identifiable information) for you. Note that if you haven’t enrolled in auto-renewal you still get monitoring of 10 email addresses, but that’s all.
My contacts at McAfee pointed out that the ID protection system has been revamped to offer comforting messaging, not scare tactics. Phrases like “Now you’re better prepared,” “Well done!” and “We’ve got your back” are everywhere, along with pictures of friendly people. I’ve collected some of those pictures in the montage below.
Once you get through the initial setup, the Protection Center dashboard focuses on your protection score, on a scale from 0 to 1,000. McAfee’s designers hope that users will be inspired to raise that score by doing things to improve their privacy and identity protection. To that end, the dashboard page displays a list of useful actions below the score. For starters, if the scan found any exposed personal information, you can gain points by dealing with the problem. If an email password was breached, for example, you can either change it or let the system know you already took care of the problem.
I did find this to be a slow process, because after each update McAfee popped up “Well done!” or a similar message and then asked permission to send breach notifications by text. And after each breach I addressed, I had to click back to the list of items pending attention. In addition, more than half the breach warnings had no associated website, meaning there was no way to change the password.
I’d like to say that as I worked through the reported problems my Protection Score rose steadily. Per my McAfee contacts, that’s what should have happened. However, I could frequently see notes like “Last update: 50 minutes ago.” In my own test situation, my initial score of 431 rose to 667 after I did some work, but then stuck as I kept fixing things for quite some time. After that, it suddenly zoomed to 933.
Identity Confusion
At the $124.99 per year subscription level, you get security protection for every device in your household as well as access to the Protection Center described above. Opting for the $159.99 per year Ultimate plan takes identity protection to the next level by giving you real, tangible identity theft insurance. Note that identity monitoring and identity theft insurance aren’t for the whole household—these features are just for you. As with other identity protection services, McAfee can’t prevent identity theft, but it can give you a quick heads-up and help with recovery.
But where is that insurance? If I were a simple consumer, I might think that I had finished with identity protection after I patiently raised my Protection Score. There’s no sign of any additional protection in the app’s user interface. Yet I know that the Ultimate edition, reviewed here, is also meant to include Identity Theft Insurance. So where is it?
I logged into my test McAfee account online and checked the various informative pages. On the Downloads & devices page I found a somewhat confusing clue. There are two items related to identity protection, one called “Access your identity theft protection” and one called “Access your identity theft protection service.” One states, “Sign in to your McAfee Identity Theft Protection portal…” while the other begins, “Sign in to your McAfee Identity Protection Service portal…” I edited the two into a single image to show what confused me.
This confusion is only heightened by the fact that the same page lists True Key, Safe Family, and the VPN as separate downloads. In reality, True Key and the VPN are fully integrated, and Safe Family launches from the main Total Protection interface. Cutting to the chase, the item that references identity theft protection takes you to the identity theft insurance service online.
As it turns out, I did receive an email with a link to this service. I just discounted it as being something I had already taken care of. A normal customer who didn’t realize the importance of that email might be just as lost as I was.
This service was once available separately, with several levels of protection. In fact, I still found traces of it when I began this review. McAfee has since erased those.
McAfee Identity Theft Protection
You start by setting up an account for identity protection, with your first and last name, a username, and a password, separate from your general McAfee account password. You also save a security question and answer. As always, I advise using a false answer that you’ll remember, but that nobody would guess, so as not to undermine your security.
Continuing your online protection setup, you may be a bit dismayed to find that you must enter your personal information all over again. I know I was. The list of monitored items overlaps that of the built-in Identity Protection, but it’s not quite the same. These are the possibilities for Cyber Monitoring:
- 10 email addresses,
- One Social Security Number,
- 10 phone numbers,
- 10 credit and debit cards,
- 10 bank accounts,
- One driver’s license,
- One passport,
- 10 retail or membership cards,
- 10 medical IDs,
- One International Bank Account.
McAfee watches for your personal information to turn up on the Dark Web, in online chats, data dumps from website breaches, botnets, and many other shady places. It can’t prevent your data from being breached, but it can give you an early warning, so you can deal with the problem before it gets out of hand.
Cyber monitoring watches for bad guys stealing your info; social media monitoring helps you avoid giving it away yourself. When you set up monitoring for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter, the service checks the past 45 days of posts and then checks new posts from time to time to “notify you of privacy or reputation risks with the content you are sharing.” I keep my Facebook account private, and I don’t post PII, but McAfee did flag any post where I checked in at a specific location.
Every worker needs a Social Security Number. Those who don’t have their own legitimate SSN could be using yours. The Social Security Number Trace feature reports on all names, aliases, and addresses associated with your SSN. If there’s something fishy, better to know about it right away. In a similar fashion, Change of Address Monitoring warns you if some scammer tries to redirect your mail, possibly to receive credit cards taken out in your name. In testing, this trace found use of my SSN in all the places I’ve lived for the last 20 or more years, but no illicit usage.
Monitoring for possible compromises of your personal data is just one side of this service. The other side involves help with recovery when the worst happens. If you get a warning, or if you suspect your identity has been hacked, you can call McAfee’s recovery experts for help with things like contacting account providers, notifying the police, reviewing your credit, and placing credit freezes. If you opted for the Ultimate subscription, the recovery process can include reimbursement for covered expenses related to identity theft.
Maybe nobody stole your identity, but you lost your wallet somewhere. McAfee can still help you there. The service can’t just cancel all your credit cards for you; banks will only talk to the cardholder for that. But agents can help you through the process of canceling those cards and getting a replacement for lost ID. If you’ve lost your wallet while traveling, the service offers “additional steps for your flight.”
Symantec offers LifeLock identity protection as part of Norton 360 with LifeLock Select. This suite costs $149.99 and includes five security suite licenses, five no-limit VPN licenses, and 100GB of online storage for your backups. Springing for another $100 doubles your licenses to 10 of each and raises backup storage to 250GB. At the very top, Norton 360 with LifeLock Ultimate Plus costs $349.99 per year, which gives you unlimited suite and VPN licenses and 500GB of storage. LifeLock does offer reimbursement and other payments, with available monetary caps increasing as you pay for higher levels of protection.
I don’t know why McAfee chooses to burden users with two parallel but different identity monitoring systems, nor why accessing the Identity Theft Protection system is so confusing. I found it unusually difficult to get answers on these topics from my McAfee contacts. That said, it’s a valuable service, and the possibility of reimbursement in the event of actual identity theft definitely sweetens the pot.
Minimal Impact on Performance
If your security suite puts such a drag on system performance that you turn it off, that’s not effective security. Fortunately, the days of resource-hog suites are long in the past. I do still evaluate performance impact using a few simple tests. I time certain common activities before and after installing the suite, averaging multiple runs, to come up with a percentage reflecting impact on performance.
For one test, I run a script that launches at startup and checks CPU usage once per second. When 10 seconds pass with CPU usage at 5% or lower, I consider the PC ready for use. Subtracting the start of the boot process (as reported by Windows) yields the length of time required to boot the system.
Before the current integrated suite, McAfee used to consist of numerous separate components. Getting these all launched at startup took time—in this test the boot time tripled. In my last round of testing, integration brought that down to a 19% increase. With further component integration in the present edition, adding McAfee to a previously suite-free system only increased the boot time by 8%. Note, too, that with the modern fast-booting physical system I use for this test, that 8% increase represents approximately one second.
My other two tests time scripts that move and copy a mixed collection of files between drives, and that zip and unzip that same collection repeatedly. The move and copy tests took 8% longer with McAfee on the job and the zip test just 3% longer. That’s very good, since most users spend a lot more time working with files than restarting the system. McAfee’s average impact of 6% puts it among the products with the lightest touch. However, quite a few suites have done even better. Topping that group are ESET, K7, and Webroot SecureAnywhere Internet Security Complete, which didn’t have any measurable impact on performance.
A Well-Rounded Security Suite
While the basic security protection for macOS, Android, and iOS is no different in McAfee Total Protection than in the entry-level antivirus, you do get extras apps for those platforms. Up to five members of your household can use the True Key password manager on all their devices, and you can install Safe Family parental control on Windows and mobile devices. You also get a no-limits VPN that you can use to protect five devices at a time. Identity Protection doesn’t care what devices you use, of course, and insurance that reimburses you for the costs of identity theft is great. However, the presence of two competing identity services proved quite confusing.
McAfee’s scores have improved in recent independent antivirus lab tests, but it’s still not at the top. Kaspersky Security Cloud, on the other hand, earned perfect or near-perfect scores in all recent tests. It covers up to 10 devices, and the included Safe Kids parental control system is significantly more effective than Safe Family. Norton 360 Deluxe offers five cross-platform licenses and five VPN licenses as well as 50GB of online storage for your backups. Both Kaspersky and Norton offer a full security suite on macOS, not just antivirus. These two are our Editors’ Choice winners for cross-platform multi-device suites.
