F-Secure is a Finish antivirus company that was established in 1988. The software firm is credited with several firsts in the antivirus community; F-secure discovered the first Windows Vista virus and made foray into accurate rootkit detection.  The company’s most recent antivirus offering is F-Secure Internet Security 2010.  In the 2010 version, F-Secure has abandoned the Kaspersky engine for the Bitdefender Engine for definition-based detection.  F-secure also has added on 4 additional detection engines in addition to the basic definition engine.  We will now look at some of the unique features that F-Secure supposedly offers.

Installation:

    The installation of F-Secure was very seamless as they really aren’t many options to configure.  A user can decide to use the full installation or custom installation option.  The later includes the parental controls, which I decided not to configure for this review.
    The installer download is very small at only 70 megabytes.  This is even more amazing when you consider that one installer includes the antivirus and the internet security programs all in one executable.  What’s also nice is how FSecure automatically checks and downloads newer versions or patches within the installer.
    Once the installation was completed, F-Secure immediately updated the virus definitions.  Surprisingly, unlike most other free antivirus, F-Secure does not alert the user to a full scan not yet preformed, rather a large green check mark was displayed with the words “your computer is protected”.  Unfortunately, some users may interpret this message that their computer is already virus free, when in reality; this cannot be the case if a full virus scan has not been completed.

Interface:

    One word can accurately sum up F-Secure Internet Security 2010’s interface, beautiful.  F-Secure has really spent a lot of time thinking about what a user really needs to see and be alerted to on the main interface page.  Prominent buttons display the “Status” (how the computer is protected), “Tasks” (check for updates, or open a firewall port), and “Statistics” (information on how many scanned and infected files).  Also prominently displayed from the first page are the important scan, check for updates, and settings buttons.  I also really liked the inclusion of the life preserver for the help files.
    I think the F-Secure Interface is probably best suited for the majority of computer users (easily 80%) however, it leaves out important tweakable features for the expert community.  The settings pages are lacking the substance of Bitdefender and ESET antivirus.  A user can’t really tweak the scanning sensitivity or heuristic sensitivity and the email filters and Intrusion prevention pages simply allow for an on or off option etc.  It would have been nice if F-Secure included multiple interfaces based upon user proficiency levels like Bitdefender.
   
There is a noticeable interface problem if a user were to select a trusted network adapter.  The ip address information is garbled and illegible.  I am also a little irked by the tiny hyperlinks that link to important areas such as quarantine and exclusion lists.

Features:

   
Unfortunately, F-Secure Internet Security doesn’t bring many new exciting features to the table; rather the antivirus attempts to excel at core features such as virus scanning and detection.

    Firewall.  While F-secure Internet Security 2010 utilizes the simplistic main interface, it fails to impress when it comes to firewall protection.  For programs such as Skype, a user will be alerted by a pop up to the program trying to contact an outside server.  This approach is merited but is not helpful for most users (80%) who loath pop ups and usually just click yes on any dialog box that appears regardless of the information displayed.  I think a better approach would be the Avast Free Internet Security method in which trusted programs are automatically configured.  In terms of F-Secure, I think it was also interesting that F-Secure prompted for Skype’s access given that it is already an “allowed” program by the “DeepGuard”.
   
Firewall rules can be configured for the F-Secure firewall.  However, this process is tedious because a user has to individually locate the .exe file and create a rule.  This cannot be done from the active connections list.  I also noticed that there is an auto-configured rule that allows all outbound connections.  I found this interesting because this is exactly the same protection that Windows Firewall provides (a one-way outbound only firewall).  Therefore, a user is going to have to redefine all programs that Windows Firewall has already detected (i.e. Skype) for F-Secure’s purpose.  If a user wants more protection, they have to move the slider to the non-default “Strict” setting and a barrage of popups will ensue.
   
One thing that I liked about the Firewall was the preconfigured services that focus on malware ports etc.  Unfortunately, many of the services are not activated by the current firewall rules.  In addition, some of the rules such as “Acheron’s call” seemed outdated (version 2 was shutdown in 2005).  The firewall includes intrusion prevention (no option to configure settings) and application control (essentially firewall rules but for specific applications which again conflicts with Deepguard 2.0).

    Deepguard.  Is an F-Secure technology that attempts to classify active processes as trusted or non trusted and continuously monitors any malicious changes to the processes.  I think the idea is to detect malicious process that may take on names as trusted processes (IExplore.exe) or somehow modify trusted processes.  On the test system, Deepguard properly recognized all of the safe processes.  The only complaint is that this information should be combined with the firewall to auto configure application control and firewall rules.

    Packet Logging. This feature is unique to F-Secure and essentially allows the user to capture all of the packets flowing in and out of the computer.  F-Secure then provides a log viewer to analyze the packet’s HEX, ASCII values, Destination, Description, etc.  This feature is essentially a slimmed down ethereal packet analyzer which can be tough to configure at times.

    Dialup Control.  The dialup control feature mirrors the Panda Antivirus functionality but with more specific application options.  I again, believe that this threat to be almost nonexistent.  Few dial up users will actually download F-Secure Internet Security 2010 and even fewer viruses/Trojans utilize this attack method.

    Browsing Protection.  F-Secure, as do most free antivirus, includes an anti-phishing toolbar with a link analyzer.  I appreciate that the toolbar doesn’t include automatic 404 error page redirection as does free AVG’s link scanner.  The toolbar also includes integrated parental controls even as a Firefox plugin.

Virus Detection and Scanning:

    F-Secure has been known to have superior virus protection.  These reports do have a lot of validity to them as F-Secure Internet Security 2010 was awarded the Advanced+ rating by AV comparatives.  This should be expected as F-Secure utilizes the Bitdefender Antivirus engine, which also was awarded an Advanced+ rating.  There have even been reports by several users that F-Secure detects the same false positives as Bitdefender (I personally didn’t have any false positives detected by both products).  However, I want to go over how the two products differ.  The first method is in rootkit detection.  F-Secure has their own proprietary root kit detection technology that was formerly known as blacklight.  F-Secure also includes Hydra, which is F-Secure’s own (maintained and developed in-house) virus detection engine.  There are also two other engines, which presumably utilize F-Secure’s heuristic technology.  Please use the comments area to add your comments on the available engines as F-Secure is not really specific about their detection technology.

    F-Secure includes 3 different types of scanning technology.  The first is the “Virus and Spyware” scan, which is sort of a quick scan option.  The “Virus and Spyware” scanned about 5,500 items in about 10 minutes.  The next scan option is the full system scan.  The full system scan is unbearably slow and only completed about 30,000 files in about 45 minutes.  A full system scan took more than 2 hours; I couldn’t even sit down for that long.  The final scan option is the user defined scan, which is essentially a custom scan.  The full system scan detected all of the viruses on my virus hard drive.  There weren’t any false positives detected by the scans.  One pet peeve about the scans is that there is no pause scan option only a stop scan option.  All other free antivirus include some sort of pause functionality.  I am also concerned by the fact that F-Secure advertises that their antivirus scans are “fast”.

Resource Usage:

    During idle operation, F-Secure Internet Security has 10 different processes that utilize 29 megabytes of RAM.  During a full system scan, F-Secure adds an additional scanner process of 22 megabytes and only utilizes CPU power that doesn’t exceed 20 percent.  F-Secure utilizes the least amount of CPU power of any free antivirus and internet security software that I have tested.  This is an amazing feat and should definitely be a main advertising point of this software.

Conclusion:

    F-Secure Internet Security 2010’s interface is probably the best in the industry.  The virus scanning and detection is also exceptional and the CPU usage is even more notable.  However, F-Secure suffers from the lack of customization and control.  However, F-Secure is still an excellent piece of software that should definitely be installed and downloaded.

•  Get the 2009 version for 3 months here
•  Get the 2010 version here