McAfee AntiVirus Plus – Review 2020

Do you remember those simple days when all you needed was one antivirus program for the (single) family PC? Yeah, those days are long past. The modern household teems with devices, PC, Mac, and mobile, and they all need protection. Fortunately, one license for McAfee AntiVirus Plus lets you install McAfee security software on every Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS device in your household. Windows users get such a wealth of features that the Windows edition could almost qualify as a security suite, and the Android edition is likewise loaded. Features are sparser on macOS and iOS, but iOS users get more than many companies offer. It’s an excellent value, and it did very well in some of our hands-on tests.

You pay $59.99 per year for unlimited McAfee licenses. That’s rare. Most competing companies offer one-, three-, five-, or 10-license subscriptions. For example, about the same subscription price as McAfee’s gets you 10 Sophos licenses, three Kaspersky Anti-Virus licenses, and just one Norton license. Roughly $40 per month gets you a one-device license for many antivirus products, among them Bitdefender, Webroot, and Trend Micro. Price-wise, McAfee has the competition beat.

You may see descriptions on the McAfee website or on product boxes that mention 10 licenses. Don’t worry; you really do get unlimited licenses. My McAfee contacts tell me that when lining up against other product boxes in a store, “unlimited” confuses some customers, so they display the number 10 instead.

For those strange birds who genuinely want to protect just one PC, McAfee makes a one-license, Windows-only version available at the typical price of $39.99 per year. Given that another $20 takes you from one measly license to a cornucopia of unlimited licenses, it doesn’t seem an attractive offer, and indeed McAfee doesn’t promote this edition in the US.

I should point out that with a free antivirus you effectively have an unlimited license. Kaspersky Security Cloud Free is an especially interesting example because, like McAfee, it offers cross-platform support. You can install it on all your Windows, Android, or iOS devices (but not Macs). In addition to antivirus protection, you get a subset of the bonus security features found in the full-blown Kaspersky Security Cloud.

Getting Started With McAfee AntiVirus Plus

To install McAfee on a Windows computer, you first go online and activate your license key. If you set up automatic renewal during the process, you get a Virus Protection Pledge from McAfee. That means if any malware gets past the antivirus, McAfee experts promise to remotely remediate the problem, a service that normally costs $89.95. In the unlikely event that the experts can’t clear out the malware, the company refunds your purchase price. Norton offers a similar promise, as does Check Point ZoneAlarm Extreme Security.

With that housekeeping out of the way, it’s time to download and install the product. I was pleased to find that the installer didn’t require handholding from me. Once installation is complete, the product shows off what it can do. It offers to run a scan, check for outdated applications, remove tracking cookies, and more.

McAfee’s main window features a security status indicator at left, with a list of your protected devices below. A menu across the top breaks down product features into five main pages: Home, PC Security, PC Performance, My Privacy, and My Info. Buttons at the bottom of the Home screen let you quickly launch a scan, remove cookies, boost application speed, and check for missing app patches.

Note that the macOS edition looks extremely similar. The main differences are due to the reduced feature set on the Mac.

Lab Results Both Good and Bad

All four of the independent testing labs that we follow include McAfee in their periodic reports. That’s a good sign. It means that they all consider it a significant product, worthy of their testing efforts. The actual test results range from perfect to poor, though.

Testing experts at AV-Test Institute rate antivirus products on how well they protect against malware, how light a touch they have on performance, and how little they interfere with usability by wrongly flagging valid programs and websites as malicious. An antivirus can earn six points each for Protection, Performance, and Usability, for a maximum of 18 points. McAfee did just in the latest test report. Seven others earned a perfect score, among them F-Secure Anti-Virus, Kaspersky, Norton, and Trend Micro.

Researchers at SE Labs use a capture and replay system to hit multiple antivirus tools with identical web-based attacks. Products can receive certification at five levels, AAA, AA, A, B, and C. In the latest round of testing, almost all the tested products received AAA certification, McAfee among them. Other products that reached the AAA level include Kaspersky, Microsoft, Norton, and Trend Micro.

AV-Comparatives regularly publishes a variety of tests; we follow four of them. Products that pass a test receive Standard certification. Those that achieve exceptional success can earn an Advanced or Advanced+ rating. McAfee participates in three of the tests, and earned one Standard, one Advanced, and one Advanced+ certification. Bitdefender holds an Advanced+ rating in the latest reports from all four tests, while Avira managed three Advanced+ and one Advanced.

Where most of the labs report results across a range of values, MRG-Effitas takes a different approach. Products that don’t achieve near-perfect results simply fail. One of this lab’s regular tests challenges products with a full range of malware, while the other focuses on banking Trojans. These tests are tough. Over a third of tested products failed one or the other. Along with Trend Micro, McAfee failed both. At the other end of the spectrum, Avast, Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, ESET, Norton succeeded in both these tests.

We’ve devised an algorithm that maps all the lab scores to a 10-point scale and yields an aggregate score. With 8.8 of 10 possible points, McAfee earned the second lowest score of products tested by all four labs. It beat out Trend Micro’s 8.6 score, but didn’t quite top Microsoft Windows Defender Security Center, which scored 8.9.

Looking just at those products with all four labs reporting, Kaspersky and Norton AntiVirus Plus did best, with 9.7 points, and Avast’s 9.6-point score is also quite good. Bitdefender scored 9.8 points, but its results come from just three labs.

Mcafee Gets Good Malware Protection Test Scores

In addition to checking results from the independent testing labs around the world, we put every antivirus product through our own hands-on malware protection testing. Some of the products we test don’t show up in reports from any of the labs, making hands-on tests essential. Even for a product like McAfee, tested by all four labs, this process gives us a chance to experience antivirus protection in action.

We start by opening a folder containing a collection of malware samples that we collected and manually analyzed, so we know just what damage they can do. For many antivirus products, the minimal access that occurs when Windows Explorer checks the file’s name, size, and so on is enough to trigger an on-access scan. McAfee doesn’t scan until the sample launches, so we tried launching them in batches of three or four.

Tested with the newest malware collection, McAfee caught 85 percent of the samples immediately on launch. In most cases we saw a Windows error message flash past, followed by a notification that McAfee quarantined a threat. In a couple cases, it removed the virus from an infected file while leaving the now-clean file intact. That left four percent of the samples that got past their initial launch. Each of these ran to completion without interference from McAfee. Overall, McAfee detected 96 percent of the samples and scored 9.6 points.

That’s quite a good score for McAfee, better than the company scored in my last few tests. Of products tested using my current malware collection, only G Data, with 9.8 points, and Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus, with a perfect 10 points, did better.

It takes a long time to analyze a new set of samples, so we don’t change to a new set often. For a view on how antivirus products handle current in-the-wild malware, we use a feed of the latest discoveries from MRG-Effitas. This feed is simply a list of malware-hosting URLs discovered in the last few days. We feed the list into a small program that launches each and lets us easily note whether the antivirus blocked access to the URL, eliminated the malware download, or did nothing.

McAfee’s WebAdvisor component blocked 44 percent of the URLs, displaying for most a big red warning calling the page very risky. In a few cases, a yellow notification called the page slightly risky. For another 56 percent of the sample URLs, McAfee quarantined the download, announcing “Woah, that download is dangerous.” (Yes, it says “woah,” like the dog Snowy in the popular Tintin children’s books.) Interestingly, both these figures are within one percent of McAfee’s scores when previously tested, even though the selection of malware-hosting URLs is completely different.

One way or another, McAfee defended against 100 percent of the malware downloads, a perfect score. Sophos and Vipre Antivirus Plus share that perfect score, with Bitdefender and G Data close behind at 99 percent.

After installing a new antivirus, you should always run a full scan. When last tested, McAfee’s full scan took hours and hours, vastly longer than most. This time it completed a full scan in 72 minutes, only slightly longer than the current average. A repeat scan finished in a sprightly 24 minutes due to optimization during the initial scan. It’s true that some competing products have gained even more speed in the repeat scan test. Trend Micro went from 44 minutes to six minutes, for example, and ESET NOD32 Antivirus went from 66 minutes to seven minutes.

Fabulous Phishing Protection

To create a Trojan that steals a user’s account credentials, a malware coder must find a way to slip past layers of antivirus protection and the operating system’s own security features, which is no small feat. It’s a lot easier to just bamboozle the user into giving away those credentials. Phishing fraudsters create duplicates of secure sites and spread links through spam, malicious ads, and the like. Bank sites, online gaming, dating sites—no secure site is immune. If you log in to the fake, you’ve handed your account over to the fraudsters. Such sites quickly wind up blacklisted, but the malefactors simply pop up new ones.

Because phishing pages are ephemeral, we test using the very newest reported phishing sites, scraped from websites that track them. We make sure to include those that have been reported but haven’t yet gone through analysis. This puts pressure on the antivirus to heuristically examine web pages and detect frauds without relying on an always-outdated blacklist.

We launch each URL simultaneously in four browsers, starting with one protected by the product in testing. The other three depend on protection built into Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. We run through hundreds of reported phishing URLs, discarding any that don’t connect for one or more of the browsers, and any that aren’t verifiable credential-stealing frauds.

McAfee aced this test with 100 percent detection, beating out the competition. Bitdefender and Norton took 99 percent in their own latest tests. Coincidentally, we tested Trend Micro at the same time as McAfee, using the same samples. Trend Micro detected a respectable 96 percent, the same score as Kaspersky.

Scores in this test are all over the map, with almost two-thirds of the products failing to outperform one, two, or even three of the browsers. At the winners’ end of the scale, McAfee and five others scored 97 percent or better and beat out all the browsers.

Ransom Guard

Ransom Guard, McAfee’s ransomware protection component, doesn’t have any visible presence. It’s just another layer of real-time protection. If regular protection doesn’t recognize a brand-new ransomware attack, Ransom Guard watches its behavior. At the first faint sign of an attempt to encrypt files (what McAfee calls “file content transformation”), Ransom Guard makes protected copies of those files and cranks ups its vigilance. When it reaches a firm decision that the program is truly ransomware, it quarantines it and restores the files from backup. Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security does something similar.

When possible, we simulate the zero-day possibility by turning off real-time protection, leaving only the ransomware component active. But as with Trend Micro, turning off real-time protection also disables Ransom Guard.

We did find a way to impose a small challenge on Ransom Guard. We keep hand-modified versions of every sample, to test the flexibility of on-sight malware recognition. McAfee’s regular protection caught all the ransomware samples at launch, but it didn’t handle the modified samples quite as well.

Out of a dozen samples, two launched but didn’t do anything—no encryption behavior for Ransom Guard to detect. The regular real-time protection caught five before they could launch, identifying them as generic malware. McAfee identified exactly one of these samples as ransomware, without invoking Ransom Guard. It caught two more after they launched and before they could do any harm.

That leaves three ransomware samples, one standard file encryptor, one whole-disk encryptor, and one screen locker. Unfortunately, all three of these ran to completion, doing their dirty deeds right under McAfee’s nose.

We turned to KnowBe4’s RanSim, a ransomware simulator for another take on McAfee’s ransomware-fighting skills. This tool runs 10 scenarios that emulate common ransomware behaviors, along with two benign encryption techniques. McAfee initially quarantined RanSim’s launcher and data collection components. We restored them, added them to the exclusions list, and tried again. McAfee did block all 10 of the scenarios, but its pop-up notifications just called them suspicious, with no message from Ransom Guard. It’s hard to see Ransom Guard as a success.

Last time we checked with a McAfee contact about the non-appearance of Ransom Guard, we were told that “This is an evolving technology, still being tuned to balance false positives and false negatives.” We can hope it will eventually evolve into something demonstrably effective.

Ransom Guard is, of course, just one of a huge number of features offered by this suite-like antivirus. For now, I’d suggest supplementing it with a free, purpose-built ransomware protection utility.

Unobtrusive Firewall

Most security companies reserve firewall protection for the full-blown security suite, but McAfee puts it right in the standalone antivirus. In testing, the firewall correctly stealthed all ports and resisted the web-based attacks we threw at it. Since the built-in Window Firewall can do the same, this test is only significant if a third-party firewall fails it.

Those of us who’ve been around long enough remember the early personal firewalls, with their incessant, incomprehensible queries. Microsfot.exe wants to connect to URL 100.2.3.4 on port 8080; allow or block? Few consumers are qualified to answer those questions. Some always allow access. Others always block access, until they break something, and switch to allow. It’s not an effective system.

Like Norton, Bitdefender, and others, McAfee doesn’t rely on the untrained user to make these decisions. In its default Smart Access mode, the firewall makes those decisions internally. If you get nostalgic for pop-ups, you can dig into the settings and change Smart Access to Monitored Access, but, really…just don’t. Yes, there are tons of ways to configure and fine-tune the firewall, but the average user should just leave them alone.

Not being average users, we did play with some of the settings. We turned on Monitored Access and noted that the firewall correctly asked what to do when a hand-coded browser tried to get online. We could block it, allow access once, or allow always. We were mildly surprised to find that it also asked about Opera and Firefox; you’d think those would get a pass.

We enabled Intrusion Detection and attacked the test system with about 30 exploits generated by the CORE Impact penetration tool. None of the exploits succeeded in infecting the fully patched test system, but the firewall didn’t do anything in defense of the system. We did find that McAfee’s antivirus side took out the exploit payload for 14 percent of the samples, identifying most by their official CVE number. That’s better than McAfee’s zero percent detection in the last few tests, but Kaspersky detected 84 percent of these exploits, and Bitdefender caught 74 percent.

Firewall protection isn’t much use if a malware coder can craft an attack that disables it. As part of regular firewall testing, we attempt to disable protection using techniques that a coder could implement. We didn’t find any way to turn off protection by tweaking the hundreds of keys and thousands of values McAfee adds to the Registry, so that’s good.

We tried to kill off the software’s 17 processes, but it protected them all. Six of its essential Windows services were also protected, but we managed to stop and disable the other three, including the WebAdvisor service. When a service is disabled, it doesn’t restart on reboot. And, indeed, after reboot WebAdvisor didn’t function. Clearly the developers know how to protect processes and services. As we’ve said in previous reviews, why not extend protection to all of them?

See How We Test Security Software

Cryptojacking Blocker

A ransomware attack is like, well, being held for ransom. It’s scary and almost violent. Cryptojacking is a much more subtle attack. You visit a website, and it coopts your system resources as part of a distributed system that mines for bitcoins or other cryptocurrency. Bear in mind that there’s nothing illegal about mining for bitcoins. Mining is where bitcoins come from! The problem comes when a website or program hijacks your computer’s resources to do the job.

Piggybacking on WebAdvisor, the Cryptojacking Blocker keeps these sites from leeching away your resources. It suppresses cryptojacking code when found, and slides in a banner explaining what it did. There is an option let the site use your resources regardless. Why would you do that? Because there are a few sites that openly use cryptomining for financial support, instead of relying on advertisement revenue.

My Network

The My Network page lists all the devices it sees on your network, identifying them by name when it can and listing the IP address of unknowns. You can dig in for more detail, including the device’s unique MAC Address. Using the MAC and IP addresses, a determined user can figure out which device each unknown matches, and edit the name and device type in the network list.

My Network shows online/offline status of each device and marks those that have McAfee protection. You can set up a trust relationship between multiple Windows boxes, which allows you to monitor and even configure security remotely. On the flip side, you can mark a device as an intruder, which tells McAfee to deny any access attempts from that device.

My Network has been around for many years. There’s another, newer feature that takes the concept to the next level. If you click the Protect more devices button on the Home screen, you get three choices: PC or Mac; Smartphone or tablet; and Unprotected devices. This last choice lists the devices on your network that could benefit from McAfee protection but don’t yet have it. If you don’t see all the devices you expect, give it time. It turns out that McAfee waits as much as 24 hours before fully populating the list.

Vulnerability Scan

Some hackers devote their time to finding security holes in popular apps or even operating systems and using those holes to create attacks that breach security. Opposing them, software companies patch these security holes as quickly as they can. But the hard work by security defenders does no good unless you, the user, apply those security patches. McAfee’s Vulnerability Scanner reports on products that need a security update.

Like Avast Premium Security and Avira Total Security Suite, McAfee Antivirus Plus automates the update process when it can. Just click the Install Updates button and sit back. If it can’t automate an installer or two, you’re still better off for the ones it did fix automatically. We generally keep test systems up to date, but McAfee found a Firefox update that we hadn’t gotten to.

Secure Deletion

Deleting a file in Windows just sends it to the Recycle Bin, where anybody with access to your computer could pull it out. Even when you bypass or empty the bin, your deleted file data remains on your disk, subject to forensic recovery. The Shredder tool, found on the My Privacy page, overwrites files before deletion to foil forensic recovery. It offers three shred types, differing in the number of times they overwrite data before deletion. Basic goes for two overwrites, Safe for five, and Complete for a whopping 10 overwrite passes. You can shred the Recycle Bin, or Temporary Internet Files, or any file or folder you really want permanently deleted.

Secure deletion is especially important when used in conjunction with a file encryption tool like the File Lock component of McAfee Total Protection. If you don’t thoroughly delete the plaintext originals, they could be recovered using forensic software or hardware. Kaspersky Total Security goes farther, automatically offering to shred the originals after an encryption job.

Cleanup and Speedup

Clicking the Remove Cookies and Trackers button on the main page opens McAfee’s QuickClean feature. QuickClean scans your computer for cookies and temporary files. These both use up valuable disk space and potentially provide a snoop with information about your browsing and computer use habits. When it has found tracking cookies and other junk files, it reports how much space you could save by cleaning up. You can dig in for a bit of detail about the kinds of things the scan found, but most users should just continue to the cleanup phase.

The PC Performance page has two features, Speed Up Apps and Speed Up Browsing. To speed up apps, PC Boost runs in the background looking for apps that need more resources as they load, and gives them what they need. McAfee reports lab results showing an average six percent faster load. It also diverts extra resources to the foreground app. Per McAfee’s own tests, this enhanced app performance from 11 to 14 percent. A report page lets you know what this feature has done for you lately. Without that report page, we wouldn’t have known it was doing anything.

The feature to speed up your browsing only works in Google Chrome, so we installed the McAfee Web Boost Chrome extension, whose purpose is to stop auto-play videos from launching. It works. The video even displays the overlay Paused by McAfee Web Boost. I don’t know how many times I’ve been startled by a loud video playing unexpectedly on a page. And if you wish, you can exempt videos on any site from Web Boost’s activity. I would expect something called Web Boost to do more than just suppress videos, and I’d expect it to work in more than one browser.

Mac Protection

I’ve written a full and separate review of McAfee AntiVirus Plus (for Mac) on the macOS platform; I’ll refer you to that for details. It’s not truly a different product; you still get protection for all your Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS devices. But you don’t get as many security features on the Mac. The Mac edition didn’t get an update this time around.

A high point of the review is that it managed 98 percent protection against phishing attacks, just a couple points behind the Windows edition. The user interface matches the Windows version, except for the omission of Windows-only features. However, McAfee has no current lab scores for Mac-specific malware protection. For a full evaluation, please read my review.

Android Protection

The easiest way to install McAfee on an Android device is to use the online console to send yourself an install link. We found that the email came with a one-time activation code, but I didn’t need to actively enter that code. As with all Android security products, McAfee requires a passel of permissions, but it helpfully leads you through granting everything necessary.

The user interface focuses on a big Scan button, with buttons for four of the many other features below. Swipe up for a list of your McAfee-equipped devices, color-coded to show security status. You can click for a more detailed look at status, though you can’t fix security problems remotely. Tap the menu at top left for access to all features.

Android Lab Results

The testers at AV-Test Institute offer Android security apps up to six points each for effective protection, small performance impact, and low false positives, with six points available in each category. Like just over half the products in the latest test, McAfee took the full 18 points.

Reports from AV-Comparatives list the percentage of Android malware thwarted. This lab’s latest report didn’t include McAfee, but last time around McAfee turned in a respectable 99.9 percent score, beaten only by Trend Micro with 100 percent.

Researchers at MRG-Effitas report separately on early detection and on detection at the time of installation. They also report separately on handling of lower-risk PUAs (Potentially Unwanted Programs), and break down results for categories such as Trojans and Spyware. In the latest test, Bitdefender alone earned 100 percent in both early detection and install-time detection. Last time around, McAfee came close, with 98.8 percent for early detection and 96.3 percent for detection at install. But in the latest test, McAfee fell to 19.3 percent for early detection, though it managed 99.2 percent for install-time detection.

As with the Windows version, McAfee’s scores cover a range. It took a perfect score from AV-Test, but a totally dismal score in one test from MRG-Effitas.

Scan Two Ways

When you tap the big Scan button, McAfee scans to make sure your Wi-Fi is secure and quickly checks your apps. You can also choose a deep scan that looks at preinstalled apps, files, and messages. Both scans ran in seconds on the Moto G5 I use for testing.

Anti-Theft Features

To get full advantage of McAfee’s Android anti-theft features, you need to give the program access to your camera and location. As with most such services, you must also give McAfee Device Administrator status, so it can remotely wipe a hopelessly lost device.

With these features configured, you can deal with a lost or stolen phone from the McAfee online console. Click on the device that’s in trouble and enter the PIN you defined on that device. If you’ve just misplaced the device around the house, you can make it sound an alarm. If the situation is worse, click I Lost My Device, which locates the device on a map.

Only when you click the It’s Still Lost option do you get the scary options to wipe the phone’s data or reset it to factory settings. Here you can also choose to track its location for a month, and to back up your personal data to the McAfee cloud. Note that due to changes by Google, the backed-up personal data no longer includes call logs and text messages.

Other features include Thief Cam, which, like the Mugshot feature in Kaspersky, snaps a photo after multiple failed attempts to unlock the device and an automatic location message when the battery is very low.

App Lock and Guest Mode

Like Bitdefender, McAfee offers an App Lock feature that locks your most sensitive apps behind a PIN. A sneak thief who picks up your unlocked phone still won’t be able to read your email or place orders on Amazon, provided you’ve locked them up. Bitdefender, Norton, ESET, and several others offer a similar feature.

Parents these days give crying kids their phones to placate them. Sure, a nice streaming cartoon will calm kids down, but you really don’t want them getting into other apps. Guest Mode, previously called Kid Mode, is like the inverse of App Lock. Instead of locking certain apps, it locks everything and only allows access to the apps you specify. Apps outside the list aren’t merely locked; they vanish from the home screen.

Bonus Features

McAfee’s Android solution doesn’t stop with security; most of these additional features appear when you tap the menu icon at top right. The Storage Cleaner looks for junk files, app data, and data files that you could delete to gain storage space. Memory Booster frees up memory allocated to apps that aren’t in use. Safe Web keeps you safe from dangerous websites, like WebAdvisor does on Windows. When I ran a quick sanity check, Safe Web on Android blocked the same pages that Web Advisor did on Windows.

Safe Wi-Fi warns when you connect to an unsecured hotspot. You can back up your personal data to the cloud. The Battery Booster takes control of screen brightness and sleep timeouts to save battery. App Privacy reports on the permissions required by your apps and flags any that seem out of line.

McAfee can track your data usage and warn if it’s approaching the limit. You set the monthly cap and tell McAfee what day today is in the billing cycle. That lets it track progress and warn when you use too much. As you can see, this a comprehensive Android security suite.

Protection for iOS Devices

As on Android, McAfee on Apple has a simplified, streamlined user interface. However, the feature set is sparse by comparison. It has the same big scan button, which scans the system and the Wi-Fi network for threats. It’s not entirely clear what happens during the system scan, though it did recognize that my test iPad needed an iOS update. On Android, it clearly states that it’s scanning for viruses, and shows a completion percentage. I did find its forced portrait orientation a little annoying, given the sparse use of screen space.

You get Safe Web for iOS devices too, but you must set it up separately. For iOS, McAfee implements Safe Web as a VPN connection. For a sanity check, we tried to visit a handful of known phishing sites that were blocked on Windows and Android. It caught some, but not others. Checking with McAfee, we learned that the VPN-based version of Safe Web necessarily checks for phishing at the domain level. If hackers manage to winkle a fraudulent page into an otherwise legitimate domain, the iOS Safe Web won’t catch it.

Our McAfee contact confirmed that if you install an actual VPN it will supersede the Safe Web proxy VPN. Also, some browsers deliberately evade Proxy VPNs, so McAfee works specifically with Safari, Chrome, and Firefox.

The Anti-Theft component is more complete than most iOS offerings. From the web console, you can locate your device on a map, and you can sound a loud alarm to find a nearby device. Be warned; the alarm sounds like a woman screaming. Another button puts a message on the device instructing the finder to contact you and return it. You can remotely back up your contacts to the cloud (if you remembered to enable this feature on the iPad first).

We were surprised to find a Wipe option; that’s not something you usually find in an iOS antitheft app. It turns out that invoking this option simply wipes your contacts from the device. McAfee can also send a last location message just before the phone runs out of battery power.

The final piece of the iOS puzzle is the media vault. When you enable this feature, it moves selected media to encrypted storage. It warns at setup that you must move files out of the vault before uninstalling McAfee, or risk losing them. You enter and confirm a six-digit PIN and give McAfee access to your photos. Now you can move photos into the vault, or snap new photos directly to the vault, bypassing the regular Photos app. Given that most of us snap photos for sharing, not hiding, I don’t know how much use this feature will get.

That’s it for McAfee on iOS, but it’s more than many companies offer.

Comprehensive Protection

McAfee AntiVirus Plus doesn’t consistently get the best marks from the independent labs, but it seems to be improving. It’s still not up to the near-perfect lab scores of Bitdefender and Kaspersky, but McAfee did ace both our phishing protection test, and our malicious URL blocking test, with 100 percent success. You get the most comprehensive protection when you install it on Windows. The Android edition is also quite full featured, but you get less protection under macOS and still less on iOS devices.

We remain somewhat concerned about McAfee’s failure against several attacks involving hand-modified real-world ransomware. The fact that these got past its defenses suggests it might be vulnerable to a zero-day ransomware attack. However, the wealth of features for Windows and Android, along with the product’s generous unlimited licensing, outweigh that fumble, enough to let the product remain an Editors’ Choice.

In a wired, modern household with a mix of platforms, McAfee’s unlimited licensing is a sweet deal. However, if what you need is antivirus protection for a defined number of PCs, you may prefer one of our other Editors’ Choice products. As noted, Bitdefender Antivirus Plus and Kaspersky Anti-Virus are the darlings of the independent labs. And Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus is the tiniest antivirus around. Your choice should depend on exactly what you want to protect.

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Further Reading