Every security company needs to carefully manage the features offered in its antivirus, security suite, and security mega-suite products so the user sees a benefit at each level-up.
ESET Internet Security hits that mark.
In addition to the expected firewall, spam filter, and parental control features, ESET Internet Security also includes webcam security, online banking protection, and a home network analyzer.
It packs in a lot of features, but they're not all top quality.
In particular, the old-school firewall is unusually annoying when fully activated, and the parental control system does nothing but filter web content.
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, cost $10 per year.
A three-license subscription runs to $69.99, quite a bit less than the three-license price for Trend Micro Internet Security, Bitdefender, and Kaspersky.
Norton used to cost $89.99 per year for five cross-platform licenses, the same as ESET.
It’s now $104.99, but that subscription gets you five licenses for a powerful security suite, five no-limits VPN licenses, and 50GB of online storage for your backups.
McAfee, too, went for $89.99 not so long ago, for unlimited licenses covering every device in your household.
An unlimited McAfee Total Protection license now runs $149.99, which is still a good deal if you’re protecting dozens of devices.
In general, ESET costs a bit less than most of the competition.
It’s not immediately obvious, but your licenses can also activate ESET’s macOS and Android security products.
You can also activate macOS protection with an ESET antivirus license, but using a suite license gets you the Pro edition, which I’ll discuss 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 antivirus component, these buttons launch an antivirus scan, check for updates, and link to your ESET account online.
Buttons in the suite scan for malware, launch Payment Protection for safe banking, and run the network analyzer.
Not everyone needs parental control, or wants anti-theft software, so ESET doesn't enable these components by default.
You can install them during installation if you wish, or add them to your setup later.
ESET is an eastern European company, based in Bratislava, Slovakia.
As such, it has required a bit more effort than some to gain mindshare in the US, but it certainly succeeded.
In a 2019 survey, Daxdi readers named ESET their favorite security suite, beating out well-known names, such as Norton, Webroot, and Microsoft.
ESET moved to second place in the 2020 antivirus satisfaction survey, edged out by Webroot, but second place is still impressive.
Shared Antivirus Features
This suite builds on the powerful antivirus protection found in ESET NOD32 Antivirus.
Our antivirus review goes into detail about those features; we hope you'll read it.
Here, we offer a digest of those findings
ESET participates in tests by all four of the four independent labs whose test reports we follow, with scores that are consistently excellent.
It passed both the tough tests administered by MRG-Effitas, where two-thirds of tested products failed at least one.
SE Labs certified ESET's malware-fighting ability at the AAA level, the highest of five levels.
Reports from AV-Test Institute rate products on Protection, Performance, and Usability, with six points possible for each.
ESET earned 17.5 of 18 possible points, a score good enough to earn it the title Top Product (along with quite a few others)
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 four tests we track, ESET earned Advanced+ in all four.
Only Bitdefender and Kaspersky.
For comparison purposes we use an algorithm that maps all the tests to a 10-point scale and derives an aggregate lab score.
ESET’s 9.9 point aggregate score is excellent.
Only Kaspersky has a better score at present, a perfect 10.
ESET eschews the quick scan offered by many competitors, but its full scan finished in 51 minutes, better than average.
In addition to its unusual UEFI firmware scan, the custom scan option now offers a scan of the system Registry and the WMI databases, in each case seeking links to infected files and malware disguised as data.
In our own hands-on malware protection test, ESET detected 89 percent of the samples and earned 8.3 of 10 possible points.
Others have scored quite a bit higher.
Challenged with the same set of samples, Webroot earned a perfect 10 points; G Data came second, with 98 percent detection and 9.8 points.
However, lab test scores like ESET’s outweigh our hands-on test scores.
Using a feed of malware-hosting URLs discovered recently by researchers at MRG-Effitas, we checked ESET's ability to block the latest prevalent malware.
It earned a very good 93 percent protection score, mostly by blocking all access to the dangerous URLs.
Tops in this test are McAfee, Sophos, and Vipre, which all earned a perfect 100 percent.
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 93 percent of the verified frauds, a score that puts it in the top 10.
Note, though, that McAfee, Bitdefender, and Norton all scored 99 percent protection in their respective tests.
Other Shared Features
ESET's Host Intrusion Prevention System (HIPS) aims to prevent attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in your operating system or applications.
When we hit it with real exploits generated by the CORE Impact penetration testing tool, ESET actively blocked 52 percent, which is better than many competing products.
No exploits breached security, as the test system was fully patched.
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; 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 this scanner and save a baseline snapshot, in case you 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.
If you have licenses to spare, you might even consider installing ESET on your Linux boxes, though Linux malware is rarely seen.
See How We Test Security Software
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.
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 requires 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 is similar.
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.
Alas, 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 central 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 accounts 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 made difficult by the fact that you can only see three at a time in the tiny scrolling window.
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 an as-if 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 naughty 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 earlier.
If you want a suite that includes fully functional parental control, there are plenty of possibilities.
With Norton, you get the full-featured Symantec Norton Family Premier.
And Kaspersky's top-tier suite comes with the powerful Kaspersky Safe Kids.
ESET's simple content filter pales by comparison with the fully functional parental control systems found in these suites.
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...
