PANDA PLATINUM INTERNET SECURITY 8.0

You’ll find Panda Platinum Internet Security 8.0 (£49 inc. VAT) in all sections of the Panda website, including its business sections. The idea is that the software provides a comprehensive service to stop employees being infected by viruses, plagued by spam or shocked by lewd web content. Panda Platinum aims to be a complete Internet security package. I

n addition to the core firewall and antivirus software there are modules to prevent spam, stop spyware and to monitor web content. These are all laudable aims, but we are unsure that the correct place for this sort of software is on the client machine. It’s easier and more efficient to implement these policies on the company’s servers, but there’s no harm in protecting the clients as a second line of defence. Installing the software is straightforward enough, and it includes a memory scan during installation to check your laptop isn’t already infected with a virus. After that you register the software and Panda gives you a user name and password, which you need to key into the software.

Once that’s done you can download virus identity updates. Sadly, that’s as good as it gets. We started by setting the web content monitoring filter at ‘employee level’ and found that we were blocked from accessing technical news websites and also prohibited from opening http://.news.bbc.co.uk. The only way to be sure an employee can access a particular site is for the administrator to add that site to a white list, as opposed to blocked sites that appear in a black list. During our testing we restarted our test laptop and were amazed that the web content and the anti-spam modules disabled themselves for no apparent reason.

We were also unimpressed that the Firewall has a default setting that says ‘do not ask when common programs access the Internet’, which includes Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Messenger, Windows, Word and Windows Media Player. This seems rather too trusting. Finally, we were confused about the anti dialler feature, which seems more appropriate to a home PC that uses a modem whereas professional users tend to use a network. In fact that’s our view of this entire package. It’s for home use, and not really suitable for the professional market.

PRICE: £42/£49 (EX/INC. VAT) WITH ONE YEAR OF UPDATES
RATING: 5
KEY FEATURES: ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE WITH FIREWALL, ANTI-SPAM AND WEB MONITORING FEATURES
OS COMPATIBILITY: WINDOWS 95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP
CONTACT: 0870 444 5640 WWW.PANDASOFTWARE.COM