Most security companies offer protection at three levels: basic antivirus, entry-level security suite, and feature-rich security mega-suite. The trick is to balance the features at each level so that the user gets significant benefits at each upgrade. ESET Internet Security occupies the middle slot in this model, and upgrading from the antivirus gets you quite a lot. In addition to the expected firewall, spam filter, and parental control features, ESET Internet Security also brings you webcam security, online banking protection, and a home network analyzer, as well as protection for your macOS and Android devices. It packs in a lot of features, some of them top quality, others not quite up to that standard.
How Much Does ESET Internet Security Cost?
A one-license subscription to this suite costs $49.99 per year. Additional licenses, up to a total of 10, add $10 per year to the subscription price. For example, a three-license subscription runs to $69.99, about $10 less than the three-license price for Trend Micro Internet Security, Bitdefender, and Kaspersky.
Five ESET licenses would cost $89.99 per year, while you pay $104.99 for five Norton licenses. Note, though, that with Norton you get five licenses for a powerful security suite, five no-limits VPN licenses, and 50GB of online storage for your backups. McAfee doesn’t cap the number of devices you can protect. A $149.99 yearly subscription covers every Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS device in your household. There’s no direct comparison with McAfee’s no-limits play, but in general, ESET costs a bit less than most of the competition.
Getting Started With ESET Internet Security
As with many modern security suites, you manage your protection through an online console, in this case called ESET Home. Select your license, download the product, and you’re ready to install. You can also install protection on macOS and Android devices or send an email with an installation link. Note that using a suite license on a Mac gets you the Pro edition. I’ll discuss the difference below.
At a quick glance, this suite’s spacious main window looks just like that of the standalone antivirus. ESET’s blue-eyed cyborg mascot gazes inscrutably from one corner. A big status indicator dominates the screen; when it’s green, all’s well. Three blue button panels run across the lower part of the screen. In the standalone antivirus, these buttons launch an antivirus scan, check for updates, and link to your ESET account online. The three buttons in the suite invoke a network security scan, launch Payment Protection, and display a security report.
Not everyone needs parental control, or wants anti-theft software, so ESET doesn’t enable these components by default. You can choose to include them in the initial installation if you wish or add them to your setup later.
Shared Antivirus Features
This suite builds on the powerful antivirus protection found in ESET NOD32 Antivirus. My antivirus review goes into detail about those features; I hope you’ll read it. Here, I offer a digest of those findings
ESET participates in tests by three of the four independent labs whose test reports I follow, with scores that are mostly excellent. It passes both the tough tests administered by MRG-Effitas, where over half of tested products failed at least one.
Reports from AV-Test Institute rate products on Protection, Performance, and Usability, with six points possible for each. Like 80% of products in the latest test, ESET earned a perfect 18 of 18 possible points.
Rather than using a numeric scale, the testers at AV-Comparatives certify products as Advanced+, Advanced, or Standard, depending on how well they perform. Of the three tests I track, ESET earns one apiece of Standard, Advanced, and Advanced+. Avast, AVG, BitDefender, and McAfee took Advanced+ in all three.
For comparison purposes I use an algorithm that maps all the tests to a 10-point scale and derives an aggregate lab score. ESET’s 9.4 point aggregate score is good, but others do even better. Also tested by three labs, AVG currently holds a perfect 10 points and Bitdefender rates 9.9. Tested by all four, Kaspersky comes in at an impressive 9.9 points.
ESET eschews the quick scan offered by many competitors, but its full scan finished in just under a half-hour, quite a bit better than the current average of 66 minutes. In addition to its unusual UEFI firmware scan, the custom scan option offers a scan of the system Registry and the WMI databases, in each case seeking malware disguised as data and links to infected files.
In my own hands-on malware protection test, ESET detected 89% of the samples, but the fact that quite a few managed to install executable files despite ESET’s detection dragged its overall score down to 7.9 of 10 possible points. That’s the lowest score among products tested with this same set of samples. Also tested with the same samples, Malwarebytes scores a perfect 10, with McAfee and Sophos close behind at 9.9 points.
Using a feed of malware-hosting URLs discovered recently by researchers at MRG-Effitas, I checked ESET’s ability to block the latest prevalent malware. It earns a very good 96% protection score, mostly by blocking all access to the dangerous URLs. Tops in this test are McAfee, Norton, and Sophos, which all earned a perfect 100%.
The same component that watches for dangerous sites also aims to foil phishing sites, fraudulent pages that imitate secure sits to steal your credentials. ESET detected 92% of the verified frauds, a score that just misses being in the top 10. F-Secure, McAfee, and Norton all score 100% in their respective tests.
Other Shared Features
Modern security offerings go beyond simply protecting one device. A central hub to manage all your installations is more important than ever. That’s where ESET Home (formerly My ESET) comes into play. Log in to ESET Home and you can view all your licenses and protected devices. Right from this dashboard you can open a license and add protection to the current device or send an email link to install on another device.
Shifting to the devices view, you can quickly see if any of your devices have security issues. You can get details on any problems, but to do anything about those issues you must go to the affected computer. There’s no remote configuration control like what you get with Sophos, Webroot, and a few others. The online dashboard is also the spot to manage the parental control and anti-theft components discussed below as well as the password manager introduced in the top-tier suite.
ESET’s Host Intrusion Prevention System (HIPS) aims to prevent attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in your operating system or applications. When I hit it with real exploits generated by the CORE Impact penetration testing tool, ESET actively blocked 34%, which is down from 52% in my previous test. No exploits breached security, as the test system was fully patched.
Ransomware protection has been beefed up in the latest edition, according to ESET. However, it didn’t prove out in testing. To see ransomware protection in action, I turned off the real-time antivirus component and released a gaggle of real-world malware samples. Out of 10 samples, four merrily encrypted my files with no complaint from ESET. Regular detection of in-memory malware caught another four. ESET detected the remaining two as ransomware, but one managed to encrypt 4,000 files before ESET took it down. Luckily, ESET’s non-ransomware-specific antivirus components eliminated all these samples when I allowed them to act.
Device Control in ESET is probably better suited to a business setting than the home. It puts you in control of a wide variety of device types, including card readers, imaging devices, and Bluetooth devices, as well as more traditional external drives. You could, for example, ban all USB drives, but allow exceptions for specific drives or users. Some tech-savvy parents might use Device Control to keep their kids from mounting potentially infected USB drives, but the feature is probably beyond the average user.
Both the antivirus and the suite have an impressive page of security-related tools, some for your own use and some more appropriate for use by a tech support agent. It took me a moment to find those shared tools in the suite. To reach them, you must click Tools in the menu and then click More Tools at the bottom right of the resulting screen. The most important is SysInpector, which snapshots the state of your PC and includes the ability to show what changed from one snapshot to another. Be sure to run SysInspector and save a baseline snapshot, in case you (or a tech support agent) need it to diagnose a problem later.
As noted, you can use one of your NOD32 licenses to protect a Mac with ESET Cyber Security (for Mac). Naturally, you can also use a suite license for this purpose.
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Firewall Remains Annoying
Windows Firewall does a fine job of fending off external attacks and making ports invisible by putting them in stealth mode. A third-party firewall that can’t match the built-in firewall is failing. Fortunately, ESET’s firewall handled those tasks in testing, both defending against web-based attacks and reporting that it had done so.
The main skill third-party firewalls bring to the table is the ability to prevent misuse of your internet connection by controlling network permissions for local programs. Out of the box, ESET doesn’t offer this feature. Its Automatic mode simply allows all outbound network traffic and blocks unsolicited incoming connections.
To enable program control, you must switch the firewall to Interactive mode. Now when it detects an unknown program attempting internet or network access, it asks you whether to allow or deny access. And by unknown, I mean any program your installation of ESET hasn’t processed before. There’s no database of known good programs.
You can make your choice a one-off, have it last until the program ends, or make a rule for ESET to remember. One-off is the default, meaning you’ll see this popup over and over until you make a rule. Clicking for more details shows the URL and port the app was trying to reach, among other things. Clicking for advanced options lets you fine-tune the rule you want ESET to save. For most users, these details and advanced options will prove incomprehensible.
It gets worse. If you’ve set a password to protect system settings, as you must do if you use parental control, ESET makes you enter that password after every firewall popup response. As if that weren’t enough, you’re then hit with a User Account Control popup. Some firewalls, like the one built into Check Point ZoneAlarm Extreme Security, use a huge database of known programs, so you hardly ever encounter an unknown. Not ESET. Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer each triggered that three-fold parade of popups. So did various Windows components. In particular, Host Process for Windows Services (svchost.exe) triggered a popup for every supported component.
Those additional steps layered on a seriously old-fashioned firewall popup query system make this the most annoying firewall ever. Norton 360 Deluxe handles security decisions internally, automatically setting permissions for known good programs, wiping out known bad ones, and keeping a sharp eye on unknowns. Kaspersky’s system of trust levels has a similar effect. And, as noted, ZoneAlarm maintains a huge database of known good files, so if it flags a program as unknown, you should really pay attention.
Security isn’t worth much if malware can disable it, so I always try disabling protection using techniques available to a malware coder. ESET resisted my every attempt. It doesn’t expose anything in the Registry that would permit turning off protection, and when I tried to terminate its three processes and two Windows services, it razzed me with an “Access Denied” message.
I’ve been calling out this annoying firewall for years; I don’t think it’s going to change. It handles outside attacks, true, but then Windows Firewall does that. The bonus you get from a third-party firewall is program control, and out of the box ESET doesn’t do that. If you choose to enable that feature, you get a terrible torrent of confusing popups.
Before I move on to other features, I should mention the Intrusion Detection System (IDS). IDS is often a feature of standalone firewall products. This component analyzes network traffic to protect against attacks across the network. ESET’s basic antivirus has HIPS, but not IDS, so I repeated the exploit protection test. The results were unchanged, with no action at all from the IDS.
One-Trick Parental Control
Parental control system features cover a wide range these days. Filtering out inappropriate content is a core feature, often accompanied by screen-time limits or scheduling. Some products monitor social media and chat, letting parents see or control their child’s contacts. Others track the child’s location via smartphone, or even define geofences such that parents get a notification when the child crosses a line. You’ll find products that enforce age limits on games the child uses, lock Safe Search to the ON position, require regular breaks from screen time, and more. Out of this wealth of possible features, the only thing ESET’s parental control does is filter out unwanted web content.
ESET doesn’t enable parental control automatically since many users don’t need it. When you do turn it on, you must define a password to protect your settings. As noted, you now need a password for every settings change, including every response to a firewall popup. You also must identify every Windows user account as belonging to a parent or to a child, and enter the birthdate for child accounts. Based on the birthdate, ESET pre-configures which of its 30 content categories to block. Parents can fine-tune the category selection, a task previously made difficult by the fact that you could only see three at a time in the tiny scrolling window. In the current edition, seven categories are in view at a time, which is an improvement.
I’m used to systems that have you put a big X next to categories that should be blocked. ESET swings the other way; everything is blocked except for categories that you’ve OK’ed with a checkmark.
When I switched to a child account for testing, I was surprised to find that ESET popped up a page offering to set up parental control. Of course, the child couldn’t make any changes without knowing the password, but it seemed peculiar.
On the plus side, the browser-independent content filter blocked every inappropriate site I tried, including HTTPS sites and even sites merely selling women’s lingerie. A three-word network command that can disable poorly written parental control systems had no effect. And since ESET handles HTTPS sites, your too-clever teen won’t slip past the filter by using a secure anonymizing proxy.
Back in the parent account I checked the logs and found that ESET logged all blocked websites, with a date/time stamp, the user account involved, and the content category that set off the filter. Kaspersky, BullGuard Internet Security, Norton, and numerous others extend their logging to also include all visited sites, not just blocked ones.
That’s it for parental control. You don’t get any of the fancy features I mentioned at the start. If you want a suite that includes fully functional parental control, there are plenty of possibilities. With Norton, you get the full-featured Norton Family. And Kaspersky’s top-tier suite comes with the powerful Kaspersky Safe Kids. ESET’s simple content filter pales by comparison with the feature-complete parental control systems found in these suites.
Spam and Email Protection
Chances are good that your incoming email stream gets junk mail and spam filtered out before you ever see it. That’s the standard, these days. If you’re one of the few that still need a local spam filter, ESET is up to the job, and it also checks for malware in your email. Many security products limit filtering to POP3 mail; ESET also handles IMAP accounts.
ESET integrates with Outlook, Outlook Express (may it rest in peace), Windows Mail, and Windows Live Mail for full control. That list suggests that this component may be outdated. The release of Windows Vista saw the end of Outlook Express, and Microsoft dropped support for Windows Live Mail five years ago. If you moved on to an email client such as Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird, or The Bat!, you’ll need to define message rules to send spam and infected messages into the appropriate folder.
You have full control over the spam filter’s configuration, from fine-tuning the ports used for different protocols to adjusting the parameters of ESET’s ThreatSense detection system. If you’re smart, though, you won’t exercise this control, as the system’s default settings offer optimal protection. The one area you may want to tweak is the whitelist/blacklist system. ESET automatically whitelists addresses found in your contacts, people you send messages to, and senders of messages that you actively classify as not spam. You can add to this list to make sure you never miss valid messages, or you can add to the blacklist to block all mail from certain addresses or domains.
Once again, most people don’t need this component, but if you require a local spam filter, ESET can take care of that task for you.
Network Inspector
An antivirus or security suite can protect your Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS devices, but what about your connected doorbell, security camera, or smart toaster? There’s no way to install security on these, but ESET at least helps you track down just what-all is connected to your home network, and flag devices with security problems.
The Network Inspector (formerly Connected Home Monitor) displays your devices in a kind of network map. Devices show up as icons in concentric rings, with your computer and router in the center. The most recently detected devices show up in the innermost ring—when you’ve just started, everything will be in that ring. Devices that haven’t connected for a while migrate to the outer rings. You only see six or seven devices at a time in the inner ring. To see more, you click on arrows that spin the view.
The display names each device that provides name information. It also attempts to identify the device as one of a dozen types, among them TV, NAS, and game console. Digging into details for an unknown device you get the IP address, MAC address, and (if available) manufacturer. Network experts who can identify an unknown device from this data are free to give it a friendly name and select a device type.
The ring display is cute, but I prefer the option to view your devices in list form. ESET initially found 14 devices on my network, including both wired and wireless connections, and more appeared during my testing. Note, too, that it pops up a notification when new devices connect.
If the network inspector identifies network services used by a device, or if the firewall has blocked any traffic from the device, that device gets flagged with a circled-i information icon. In the device’s detail report you can see what services are used. For all the flagged devices on my network, ESET reported that the services in use were appropriate and unlikely to cause security trouble. If you click to view blocked traffic, you hit a deliberate roadblock. ESET asks, have you encountered any problems with the device? If so, go ahead and view blocked traffic; if not, leave it alone. From the blocked traffic list, network experts can directly tweak firewall settings. Are you a network expert? No? Then leave it alone.
Where appropriate, the detail report includes a button to open the device’s network interface. For example, it provided quick access to the router’s configuration page, and to the network-aware printer’s embedded web server.
Avast includes a similar scanner, and anybody can download and use the free Bitdefender Home Scanner or Avira Home Guard. However, ESET’s Network Inspector scanner stands above the pack with its clear information and effective access to useful settings.
Unusual Anti-Theft System
For those oh-so-portable Android phones, loss or theft may be even more of a security threat than infestation by malware. For Windows desktop computers, typically tied to power, network and peripherals by a snarl of cables, not so much. However, laptops are so powerful these days that they can replace almost any desktop, and a laptop is easily lost or stolen. Even so, not many security suites offer anti-theft other than for mobile devices. Bitdefender Total Security is among the very few that can locate, lock, or wipe a stolen Windows laptop. ESET won’t remotely wipe a stolen device, but it can locate the device, lock it down, and snap screenshots and webcam pictures of the thief.
When you first enable anti-theft, ESET checks your system for any required optimization steps. To perform necessary optimizations, as well as to activate the anti-theft system, you log in to the ESET Home online portal. If you’ve configured the laptop to log in automatically, without a password, well, that’s a bad idea. ESET remotely restores the password requirement. In addition, it creates what it calls a phantom account. When it locks your system, nothing is visible but that phantom account. The thief can’t access other accounts or their files.
Here’s an oddity. If you enable parental control, you must identify every Windows user account as belonging to a child or to a parent. The main window turns a warning yellow until you take care of that task. That’s fine, but I found it odd that ESET required me to configure parental control for the phantom account.
Marking a device as missing doesn’t have an instantaneous effect; ESET checks in every 10 minutes. When it sees that you’ve flagged the device as missing, it reboots and logs in to the phantom account. It starts collecting the device’s location and snapping screenshots. And it keeps doing this for two weeks. If you suspect the device is merely lost, you can send a message to the finder.
I marked both my virtual machine test system and a physical PC as missing. Within a minute, both rebooted into the phantom account. I tried to switch away from the phantom account, but the other Windows accounts didn’t show up. And when I tried to open folders belonging to those accounts, Windows wouldn’t let me, not without an Administrator password (something the thief wouldn’t have).
On both systems, Windows went through the usual setup steps for a new user account after rebooting. ESET doesn’t mention this, but I suggest you log into the phantom account at least once and get those steps out of the way.
As noted, you can send a message to a missing computer, on the chance that a helpful person has found it. The message appeared quickly on both the physical and virtual test system. It did display in hard-to-read white text on a black desktop background.
Every ten minutes, ESET snapped a screenshot that I could view in the online console. Had the test systems been equipped with webcams, it would have also snapped pictures of whoever was in front of the device.
ESET analyzes Wi-Fi signals to determine the device’s location. My test systems have wired connections, so it couldn’t locate them. But then, a desktop computer is less likely to go wandering. I do note that Wi-Fi triangulation isn’t remotely as accurate as the GPS-based location system available to antitheft systems for mobile devices.
To wrap up the test, I marked both devices as recovered. They both quickly unlocked and rebooted to the login screen.
Clearly, anti-theft protection is most useful on a laptop. A portable device is more likely to go missing than a desktop PC hobbled by its wires and cables. If you install ESET on a laptop, be sure to go through the optimization steps. Once you’ve done so, log into the phantom user account once, to get past those introductory screens from Windows. Now, if your laptop goes walkabout, you’re prepared.
Banking & Payment Protection
ESET’s main window puts access to most features in the left-rail menu, but three features get a big, prominent button panel, among them Banking & Payment Protection. Clicking this panel launches a hardened version of your default browser. You’ll know it’s active, as it gives the browser a glowing green border and an ESET tab along the edge that expands into an explainer. This feature supports Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Those using a different browser as their default get a hardened Internet Explorer. That could become awkward as Microsoft pushes IE more and more into the background.
The similar Safe Money feature in Kaspersky and SafePay in Bitdefender Internet Security both activate automatically when you visit a known financial site, offering to switch from the unsecured browser to a protected one. I couldn’t find a banking site that triggered such an offer from ESET, but you can add any site manually to a list of sites that always use the secure browser. Kaspersky also identifies its secure browser with a green border, while Bitdefender displays it on an entirely separate desktop. Banking protection in G Data is invisible unless you encounter a problem such as a man-in-the-middle attack.
Some security suites discourage the use of their secure browsing systems when you’re not actually performing sensitive transactions online. With ESET, it’s quite the opposite. By flipping a switch called Secure all browsers, you tell ESET to always use the secure banking mode in the four supported browsers
Webcam Protection
Do you ever leave your laptop turned on while you’re getting ready for bed? How would you feel about some pervy peeper viewing or even recording you while you’re slipping into your jammies? Creepy, right? But malware exists that permits remote control of your webcam, without giving away its presence by turning on the tell-tale activity light. ESET joins the fight against spyware with an extension of Device Control that keeps untrusted programs from using the webcam.
Turned on by default, this feature pops up a notification when any app tries to use your webcam. If you were just setting up a video chat, go ahead and tell it to allow your video application. But if the request is unexpected, block the app and launch a malware scan. Kaspersky Internet Security and Bitdefender offer a very similar feature.
No Performance Hit
Years ago, security suites had a deserved reputation for hogging memory and other system resources, and that was a serious problem. When users turn off protection because it bogs down performance, security takes a nosedive. Security companies know they must avoid slowing performance. I didn’t notice any slowdown after installing ESET on my test systems, but I ran a few hands-on evaluations to get a clearer look.
My boot-time test reboots the system and launches a script that checks CPU usage once per second. After 10 seconds in a row with no more than 5% CPU usage, I deem the system ready for use. Subtracting the start time of the boot process (as reported by Windows) yields a measure of boot time. I average many runs with no security suite, install the suite, and then average many runs again. I do the same with a script that moves and copies a big collection of files between drives, and another script that zips and unzips the same file collection over and over. Comparing the before and after averages lets me see how much the suite slows things down.
As in previous tests, the boot time actually decreased after I installed ESET. I still record this as a zero, meaning zero increase. ESET had no effect on the file move/copy test, and the file zip/unzip test ran just 1% slower with ESET installed. Rounding means that ESET’s average impact from the three tests was zero. Webroot SecureAnywhere Internet Security Plus and K7 also exhibited no slowdown in their latest tests.
Enhancements for macOS
As mentioned earlier, a license for ESET NOD32 Antivirus can be used to activate ESET Cyber Security on a Mac. By the same token, you can use one of your suite licenses to activate ESET Cyber Security Pro. The Pro edition adds firewall and parental control, but neither addition is impressive.
ESET’s macOS antivirus has a firewall doesn’t bombard the user with program control popups, because it doesn’t attempt program control at all. The firewall built into macOS lets you put the Mac in stealth mode or block all network access if desired. By default, it allows incoming connections for built-in and signed apps. ESET lets you access a plethora of unintelligible network rules and zones, but most users shouldn’t touch those. It’s not clear that using ESET offers any benefit beyond the built-in firewall.
Parental control is much like what you get on Windows, though for some reason there are 27 blocking categories rather than 30. The big difference is that it doesn’t filter HTTPS websites at all. Secure porn sites slip right past it, as do secure anonymizing proxy sites. And once your clever teen logs into a secure anonymizing proxy, the parental system totally loses its ability to control and monitor access.
For Mac users, upgrading to the Pro edition supplied with this suite gets you very little benefit over what comes with the basic ESET Cyber Security.
Protection for Android Devices
ESET offers extremely basic Android antivirus protection at no charge. To get the powerful Premium edition, you must use one of your licenses. From the ESET Home portal, I sent an email with an installation link to the Pixel 4a that I use for testing. I activated the installation with one of my licenses and thereby gained access to all the Premium features.
Good Lab Scores
Three of the four testing labs I follow now test Android products, and two of them include ESET in their testing. Tested under Windows, ESET earns some perfect scores and some not-so-perfect. In the both of the two Android tests, it takes the maximum possible scores. To be fair, so did many competitors.
AV-Test Institute rates Android products using the same Protection, Performance, and Usability criteria as it does under Windows. In the latest Android-centric report from this lab, ESET achieves a perfect 18 points. So do all the other products I follow except for Sophos, which came close with 17.5.
AV-Comparatives didn’t rate ESET in its latest report, but MRG-Effitas did. This lab scores products separately for early malware detection and for detection at install time. Like Avira, Bitdefender, and Norton, ESET achieve 100.0% protection in both tests.
I don’t yet have an aggregate scoring system for Android lab tests. However, with perfect scores from two labs, it’s clear that ESET is a winner.
Getting Started on Android
As usual, the app requested various permissions needed to carry out its mission. On completing installation, it launched a quick scan. It suggested strengthening protection by enabling six components: Anti-Theft, Payment Protection, App Lock, Anti-Phishing, Scheduled scan, and Call Filter. Turning on these components naturally required even more permissions. For example, App Lock needed access to usage data, and Anti-Theft needed location and camera data, as well as Device Administrator permission.
Like the similar feature in Bitdefender Total Security, Kaspersky, McAfee, and others, App Lock lets you put sensitive apps behind the protection of a secondary PIN. Now even a nosy friend who picks up your unlocked phone won’t be able to peek at your emails or texts. Bitdefender takes this feature a step beyond, with options such as the ability to quickly leave and return to an app without needing a PIN, or to suppress App Lock when you’re on a trusted Wi-Fi network.
Anti-Theft for Android
As with the Windows-based anti-theft system, full activation of anti-theft features may require one or more optimization steps. You can trigger locate, lock, and wipe, as well as sound a loud siren, by sending coded SMS messages or by using the ESET Home web portal. Commands don’t take effect immediately. Rather, the device checks in every 10 minutes.
In addition to the usual remote locate, lock, and wipe functions, ESET’s anti-theft can lock the device on removal of the SIM card. Several competitors, Webroot among them, offer SIM lock. Given that the Android device I use for testing isn’t provisioned for cellular data, I can’t test this feature.
You can enable Anti-Phishing for Chrome and for other browsers you may use. I tested it using the AMTSO Features Check page and found that indeed it displayed the proper warning. Bitdefender, Kaspersky, and Webroot are among the other Android products that aim to fend off phishing frauds.
Once you’ve responded to all the recommendations, that notification window vanishes. At this point, the app bears a certain resemblance to its Windows counterpart. It uses the same white background and blue buttons, and the same status banner, complete with ESET’s cyborg mascot. Across the bottom are icons for Antivirus, Anti-Theft, Anti-Phishing, App Lock, Payment Protection, Network Inspector, Call Filter, Security Audit, and Security Report.
Useful Security Features
In the Windows edition, Payment Protection launches an instance of your default browser that’s protected against interference. On Android, you’re as likely to use an app as a browser—who logs onto Amazon.com from an Android browser? To configure Payment Protection you simply identify the apps that you want protected under the aegis of the Safe Launcher.
Network Inspector works just like its Windows equivalent, though the display can be a bit cramped on an Android phone. Tap to scan the network, then see connected devices either in a series of rings or as a simple list.
Enabling the Call Filter component requires access to calls and contacts, along with notification privileges. As expected, this feature lets you filter out calls from unwanted callers. There’s a handy button to block the most recent caller. You can choose to block calls from specific types such as hidden numbers or from all numbers not in your contacts. Given that my Android testbed isn’t provisioned for calling, I couldn’t actively test this feature.
Much like the privacy audit feature in McAfee and Webroot, ESET’s Security Audit lists applications that have potentially risky permissions. For example, it flags apps that access your contacts, or track your location. Take a moment to review these. When you tap the icon for each type of permission, you get a list, and you also clear the notification of newfound apps. When you review the audit later, you’ll see notification numbers only if there are new apps involved.
Android protection in Norton 360 Deluxe takes the app-review concept to the next level, reporting on apps in the App Store before you even download them. Trend Micro reviews your apps based on the resources they use, rather than on permissions.
Security Audit also checks your Android device’s settings, looking out for any that may not be configured correctly. For example, it warns if you’ve rooted the device, or if you have USB debugging enabled.
Payment Protection, Network Inspector, and Call Filter are relatively new to the Android app. All three are welcome additions that serve to make ESET’s offering a more powerful Android security utility. It includes all the expected antivirus and anti-theft capabilities, as well as app lock, security audit, and more. And since every standalone mobile installation costs $14.99, even in quantity, it’s actually cost-effective to use one of your $10 Smart Security licenses instead.
Good, But With Uneven Effectiveness
ESET Internet Security combines ESET’s powerful antivirus protection with all the expected suite features, and more. It includes some unusual components such as anti-theft for laptops, a network security scanner, and webcam security. However, some of the core components distinctly fail to impress. When enabled, the firewall’s program control popups are the most annoying we’ve seen, for example, and parental control is limited to content filtering. What’s more, these components haven’t improved over the past several years. We do like to see progress.
For a basic entry-level security suite, Bitdefender Internet Security and Kaspersky Internet Security take the Editors’ Choice honor. Components of both suites consistently demonstrate top-notch protections. In the mega-suite realm, Bitdefender Total Security matches ESET’s anti-theft and brings an unparalleled wealth of useful bonus features.
