Many security company product lines are as simple as one, two, three. First, they offer a simple antivirus. Adding firewall protection and other features bulks up that antivirus into a security suite. At the third and final stage is a mega-suite with additions such as online backup and system tune-up. Panda stretches that model, with a free antivirus, a commercial antivirus, and three distinct levels of security suite protection, all under the name Panda Dome. Panda Dome Essential, reviewed here, occupies the commercial antivirus slot in this pantheon, though it includes a few features more commonly found at the suite level. The app’s user interface is highly polished, even beautiful, but its results in—both labs-based testing and our own tests—don’t measure up.
How Much Does Panda Dome Essential Cost?
At $58.99 per year for a single license, this product costs a dollar less than Norton, but rather more than most other antivirus utilities, including some that add suite-level components. Bitdefender, Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security, and Webroot are among the many that go for around $40 per year. Kaspersky starts with three licenses for $59.99, the same price as a three-license pack of Bitdefender or ESET antivirus. A three-license Panda subscription costs $70.99.
McAfee AntiVirus Plus also costs $59.99 per year, but that price gets you unlimited licenses to install protection on every Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS device in your household. Note that you’ll have to purchase this one at a retail outlet, as it’s not sold directly on the McAfee website. Even at the essential antivirus level, Panda is also cross-platform, with support for Windows, macOS, and Android. If you plan to protect a bunch of devices, you can get five Panda licenses for $82.99 per year or 10 licenses for $106.99. Once you get to 10, you might consider purchasing unlimited Panda licenses for $118.99 per year.
Like the free Panda antivirus, this software eschews the usual white or slate gray background for its main window. Instead, it fills the main window with a gorgeous scene from nature. You can choose from eight nature backgrounds or set them to change automatically from time to time. Also like the free edition, it displays icons for five security features at the bottom of that main window. Scrolling down reveals two more rows of five icons, each of which gets an explanatory label when you point to it. What do these 15 icons do? Handily, you can now click a button at bottom right to display all the labels.
Features Shared With Panda Free Antivirus
You may be surprised to know that most purveyors of free antivirus utilities put all their essential protection technology into the free edition. Panda Free Antivirus doesn’t do that. It omits the Safe Browsing component that diverts browsers and other programs away from phishing and malware-hosting sites. Panda Dome Essential includes everything from the free edition, and quite a bit more. You can read my review for a full rundown on what comes free.
For every antivirus review, I check evaluations from four independent testing labs, to see what the testing experts report. At present, Panda only shows up in reports from AV-Comparatives. In three tests from that lab, its scores span the full passing range, with Standard certification for simple malware recognition, Advanced in the real-world all-features test, and Advanced+ for performance.
Tested by all four labs, Kaspersky took perfect scores across the board, for an aggregate score of 10 points, the maximum. AVG took 10 points too, based on scores from three labs. ESET NOD32 Antivirus is also up there, with 9.9 points based on tests from all the labs.
Tested with a set of malware samples that I collected and analyzed myself, Panda detected 90% and scored 8.7 of 10 possible points. Other products have scored much better against this same set of samples. Malwarebytes Premium detected 100% and earned a perfect 10 points. McAfee scored 9.9 points, and Webroot took the bronze with 9.8.
As part of my malware protection testing, I check each antivirus against a second collection of malware samples that I’ve modified by hand. Panda’s free antivirus missed more than half of these, including modified versions of half the ransomware samples. When I launched those modified ransomware samples, the free edition totally missed all but one.
Coincidentally, an upsell popup in the free edition informed me that I needed “a superior version” for ransomware protection. Clearly Panda Dome Essential is not that superior version, as it failed in the same way when put to the test.
That set of curated samples necessarily remains the same for many months, as collecting and analyzing a new collection takes weeks. For another look at malware protection, I challenge each antivirus with a very new collection of malware-hosting URLs, noting whether the antivirus diverts the browser from the dangerous URL, quarantines the malware payload, or does nothing at all. The free antivirus doesn’t include Safe Browsing, so it didn’t block access to any of the URLs. Its overall score of 79% protection, based entirely on detecting and eliminating verified malware payloads, is much better than the 35% it earned in its previous test, but it’s still quite low.
Naturally, I had to run this test again with Panda Dome Essential, to let Safe Browsing show off its skills. I’ll discuss that test below.
Panda Free Antivirus includes a handful of useful security bonus features. Like all members of the current product line, it comes with a VPN component, and like all but the most expensive suite, it imposes stringent limits on that component. You don’t get a choice of VPN server locations, and you can only use 150MB of bandwidth per day. Other bonus features include a vaccination system to armor USB drives against Autoplay malware and a bootable antivirus rescue kit for the toughest malware.
Safe Browsing Fails to Impress
As noted, this product includes Panda’s Safe Browsing, a feature that’s not part of the free edition. I repeated my malicious URL blocking test, as always using the very latest URLs supplied by London-based testing lab MRG-Effitas. The URLs are different every time, but they’re always the most recent.
When Safe Browsing detects a malware-hosting URL, it diverts the browser to a warning page. Unless, that is, the dangerous URL has a secure HTTPS address. In that case, it displays a tiny, transient warning popup and leaves the browser displaying an error. The popup is slightly confusing, as it states “1 virus deleted” followed by the offending domain. I can guarantee that the domain itself is not a virus, and that Panda didn’t delete it.
The last time I ran this test, Safe Browsing detected precisely zero malware-hosting URLs. This time around, it kept the browser away from 29% of the sample URLs. Real-time antivirus caught another 57%, for a total of 86%. That’s a bit better than the 79% score achieved by Panda’s free antivirus, but still in the bottom third of current products.
McAfee scored a perfect 100% in this test, while Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, G Data, and Sophos all reached 99%. All three steered the browser away from some URLs and wiped out other malware payloads during the download process.
Phishing Protection Improved, But…
Phishing websites are frauds that imitate banks and other sensitive sites, hoping to trick hapless web surfers into logging in. When you enter your username and password, you’ve handed over your account to the fraudsters. To lull your suspicions, the phishing site will often pass your login to the real site, so it seems that you logged in as usual. If you’re alert to their chameleon-like ways, you may be able to steer clear of such phishing scams, but just one slipup can cost you. That’s why most antivirus utilities include a component to detect these frauds. With Panda, Safe Browsing handles that task.
To test phishing protection, I start by gathering the newest suspected phishing URLs from websites that track such things. I make sure to include both verified frauds and URLs that are too new to have hit any blacklists. With my list de-duplicated, I launch each URL simultaneously in four browsers. The antiphishing components built into Chrome, Edge, and Firefox protect three of them. Naturally, the fourth relies on the product under testing.
It’s common for a URL to remain blacklisted even when the actual phishing page is gone. I don’t count those. If any of the four browsers can’t load an item, it goes in the trash. A true phishing URL must imitate a sensitive site and attempt to collect login credentials. Any that don’t fit that profile also get trashed. With enough verified frauds tested, I run the numbers.
Last time I tested this product, it got 46% on the phishing protection test, a truly dismal score. This time it managed 71%. That’s an improvement, but nearly two-thirds of current products have scored higher. F-Secure and McAfee top the list, with 100% detection, while Bitdefender, Norton AntiVirus Plus, and Webroot all managed 99%. Panda is improving, but still has a long way to go.
I tested the macOS product at the same time as the Windows edition. While phishing sites themselves are totally platform-agnostic, in my experience phishing protection systems may not be. If there’s a score difference, the Mac edition typically proves less effective than its Windows equivalent.
Not so with Panda. The macOS edition scored 78%. That’s down from its previous score of 84%, but well above the 71% earned by its Windows cousin.
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Firewall and Program Control
Firewall protection is one significant feature that you don’t get for free. I verified that Panda protects against port scans and other external attacks, putting all ports in stealth mode so that attackers can’t even see them. Of course, the firewall built into Windows handles this task, so any replacement firewall must do the same, as a minimum.
At the simplest level, you configure the firewall by identifying the network you’re using. If it’s your home network (the default) the firewall uses relatively relaxed settings. For a work network, it tightens things up a bit. If you indicate that you’re using a public network, it battens down the hatches.
Digging into the firewall’s settings, I found a group of items labeled Intrusion prevention. Normally I would test an intrusion prevention system by hitting it with several dozen exploit attacks generated by the CORE Impact penetration tool. However, I’ve learned from previous tests that whatever Panda’s defenses cover, it’s not the kind of exploit attack generated by this tool. Go ahead and look at these if you like, but unless you’re deeply familiar with terms like SYN Flood and Smurf, don’t make any changes.
Most third-party firewalls pair protection against outside attack with protection against betrayal from within. That is, they monitor programs that make use of the network and internet and make sure they don’t misuse the privilege. Firewalls in top suites like Norton 360 Deluxe and Kaspersky automatically assign permissions to known programs and carefully watch the behavior of unknowns, springing into action if an unknown program abuses its privileges.
Panda’s program control is much simpler. It does assign simple permissions to a few known processes, but in general it simply allows all outbound network connections and forbids unsolicited inbound connections. If you want program control at the per-process level, you’re free to dig in and manually define rules, but in practice nobody’s going to do that.
Early third-party firewalls were among the first security products to develop techniques for self-protection. That makes sense; a firewall’s not much use if malware can just flip its “off” switch. It’s been ages since I found anything like a simple on/off switch in the Registry, and indeed, Panda doesn’t expose any significant settings in the Registry.
I found five Panda processes in Task Manager, but I couldn’t terminate them either using Task Manager or a separate process-killer tool. Panda’s essential Windows services weren’t quite as well-protected. I stopped one of the five services with ease. I also managed to disable two of the five, preventing them from launching at startup. The other three resisted any change to their startup configuration. It’s clear Panda’s designers know how to harden processes and services against attack—I just wish they’d harden all of them.
Bonus Features
The Application Control feature is one of the few that Panda doesn’t enable by default. Don’t confuse this with the firewall’s program control, which determines how and whether programs can connect to the internet. Application Control determines which applications can run, period. When Application Control is active, no new program, whether good or bad, can run unless you grant it permission.
This kind of whitelist-based protection is at the core of PC Matic Home and a few similar products. If you run the same programs all the time, rarely adding anything new, it can be effective. You’ll just have to get used to Panda asking you what to do every time a new or updated program launches.
When Panda does detect an unfamiliar program, it pops up a query asking you whether to allow or deny it. If it’s something you’ve chosen to run, go ahead and allow it. But if it’s unexpected, hit Deny. In a rare lapse showing the product’s Spanish origin, the popup offers a link for “Más información sobre este aviso” (more information about this warning).
Some products offer a kind of Wi-Fi protection that simply pops up a warning when you connect to a hotspot that lacks security. Panda’s Wi-Fi Protection does quite a bit more. By default, it warns about networks that have what it calls medium or low security, though you can set it to only trigger on low security. Clicking for details shows you things like whether the hotspot name is too common or if the Wi-Fi channel is overused, in addition to concerns about password security.
Wi-Fi Protection also lists all the devices connected to your network. Unlike Avast’s network monitor or the standalone Bitdefender Home Scanner, this feature only works on Wi-Fi connections, not wired networks. By default, it names devices using their local IP addresses, but you can change those you recognize to use a friendly name. Panda doesn’t check your devices for insecure settings the way Avast and Bitdefender do, but it does let you raise a defensive shield to prevent any particular device from connecting with your computer.
You’d probably notice someone leaning over your shoulder to peek at the passwords you type, but keyloggers nab your passwords without being so obvious. Some use hidden processes, while others physically plug into the keyboard cable. To foil keyloggers, you can use Panda’s virtual keyboard, licensed from Password Depot. No keylogger can capture keystrokes you enter by clicking the floating keyboard, and its “fake cursors” option even foils shoulder surfers.
Protection for macOS
As noted, your licenses also let you install Panda Dome Essential for Mac. Please check my review for full details of the macOS edition; I’ll briefly summarize here.
On the Mac, Panda still uses an old-school interface, with big panels to show status and let you do things like launch scans or configure the VPN. No nature scenes here! While it does offer the same limited VPN found on Windows, it doesn’t include other features beyond basic antivirus.
Neither of the labs I follow include Panda in their Mac-centered testing, unfortunately. In testing, it quickly eliminated 75% of Windows-based malware samples; Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus for Mac wiped out 97% of those same samples.
As noted earlier, the Mac edition did perform better than the Windows version in my antiphishing test, using the exact same set of samples, at the same time. It scored 78%, compared to 71% on Windows. But, overall, it really doesn’t stand out.
Panda for Android
Anybody can install Panda Mobile Security from the Google Play store, but full access to all features requires that you apply one of your licenses for activation. As with the Windows edition, the app’s background is a scene from nature, and scrolling down reveals more features.
Panda’s Android antivirus scan just takes a few seconds. AV-Test and AV-Comparatives both publish Android antivirus test results, but as with macOS, Panda doesn’t appear in either report, so we don’t know how effective that speedy scan is.
In any case, loss or theft may be a bigger worry than malware infestation for Android owners. Panda includes the expected anti-theft features. Once you give it the necessary permissions, you can remotely locate, lock, or wipe the device from Panda’s online console. There’s an option to sound an alarm in case you need to find a misplaced device around the house. If you think the device has fallen into the wrong hands, you can remotely snap a pic of whoever is holding it. You can also configure Panda to snap a photo of anyone who tries to unlock your device several times.
When you turn on the Motion Alert feature, Panda sounds an alarm if someone picks up or moves your phone. You have five seconds (by default) to unlock the phone when you pick it up yourself. After that it sounds an alarm that doesn’t stop until you do unlock it. It’s loud; I freaked out my household by testing it. The Google Pixel that I used for testing required entry of the PIN to unlock—the default facial recognition didn’t do the job. If nothing else, this feature can power an excellent prank.
Like Bitdefender, Norton, McAfee, and others, Panda lets you put specific apps behind a secondary App Lock PIN. When you quiet a noisy youngster by handing over your phone, App Lock lets you be sure the kid doesn’t send an email blast, or buy everything on Amazon.
Just about every app you install asks for one, two, or a dozen permissions. We get accustomed to just tapping OK, and that’s not necessarily good. Panda’s Privacy Auditor reports on apps that have permissions that could be misused, with an option to delete any that seem suspicious to you. Note that tapping Delete doesn’t delete the permission—it uninstalls the app. On my test Android it flagged apps in 10 permission categories, from accessing contacts to potentially costing me money.
The Google Pixel that I use for testing isn’t provisioned for cellular service, so I couldn’t actively test the call-blocking feature. It looks very straightforward. Once you set Panda as your default caller ID and Spam app, you can block all numbers not in your contacts, all callers using hidden numbers, or any numbers you specify. In that last category, you can enter any arbitrary number or choose from your Contacts. Simple!
Panda takes care of the essential antivirus and anti-theft protection for Android, and adds common bonus features, including App Lock and an audit of app privacy. Other Android security tools offer more extensive bonus features. Norton, for example, rates the reputation of apps as you view them in the Play Store, before you even download them. Trend Micro checks your Facebook privacy settings. AVG, Avira, and Bitdefender earn top scores from three labs. Panda works fine on Android, but it doesn’t stand out.
Very Pretty, But Not a Winner
Panda Dome Essential is the lowest-tier paid product in the spiffy-looking Panda Dome line; as such it corresponds to the paid antivirus in most product lines. Its few lab scores range from OK to excellent, and it earned a so-so score in our basic malware protection test. Tested against dangerous and fraudulent websites, it scored better than its previous iteration but still nowhere near good. Bonuses include a feature-limited VPN, a basic firewall, and a comprehensive Wi-Fi security monitor. You can use your Panda licenses to install basic security on Android devices and simple antivirus on Macs, but it’s expensive compared to the competition.
Bitdefender Antivirus Plus and Kaspersky Anti-Virus routinely grace the winner’s circle in tests from the independent labs. McAfee AntiVirus Plus protects across platforms, like Panda, but it includes iOS protection and puts no limit on the number of installations. You won’t find an antivirus product smaller than Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus, and its journal-and-rollback system for unknown programs can even roll back ransomware attacks. And these four Editors’ Choice antivirus utilities all cost less than Panda.
