Many security product lines resemble a set of Russian nesting dolls.
In the center is a standalone antivirus product, with all the core protections.
An entry-level security suite encloses that central protection and adds more security features.
At the top level, a mega-suite contains everything in the basic suite, with the addition of components such as backup, performance tune-up, and identity protection.
In this scenario, BullGuard Internet Security is the middle doll.
It has all the expected suite components plus extras like backup and tune-up, but these components just aren’t all top quality.
How Much Does BullGuard Internet Security Cost?
A three-device BullGuard license costs $59.95 per year, $20 less than the price of entry-level suites from Bitdefender and Kaspersky.
If you want five licenses, the price goes to the peculiar figure of $83.95 per year.
For 10 licenses, you pay $140.95 per year.
You can use these licenses on Windows, macOS, and Android devices.
Award-winning Norton 360 Deluxe costs $104.99 for five cross-platform licenses, but that also gets you five no-limits VPN licenses and 50GB of online storage for your backup archives.
With Kaspersky Security Cloud, you pay $149.99 for 10 licenses—that’s a little more than BullGuard costs, but Kaspersky is an Editors’ Choice winner.
A $159.99 subscription to McAfee Total Protection lets you install McAfee on every Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS device in your household.
Getting Started With BullGuard Internet Security
This product’s main window contains a collection of 10 large square panels, in two rows of five, representing suite features.
Seven of the panels are enabled for your use: Antivirus Firewall, Vulnerabilities, Backup, PC Tune Up & Game Booster, Parental Control, and Secure Browser.
The remaining three, Identity Protection, Home Network Scanner, and BullGuard VPN, require an upgrade.
Note that most of these panels are also present in the standalone antivirus, but with only Antivirus, Vulnerabilities, and Game Booster enabled.
The suite does as much as possible without leaving the main window.
For example, the antivirus scan and vulnerability scan report progress right in their respective panels.
Immediately after installation, the window displays the left four panels in each row, with a slider to reveal the other two.
You can expand the window to show all 10 at once or shrink it to display three and a half panels in each row.
Yes, the latter is an odd look.
Shared Antivirus Features
This suite offers precisely the same antivirus protection found in BullGuard Antivirus, which ran into some trouble in our testing.
Below is a summary of our findings.
Please read the full review for details.
BullGuard only appears in test reports from one of the four independent antivirus testing labs we follow, AV-Test Institute.
On the plus side, that one test score came in at the very top, an honor BullGuard shared with eight other products, including Kaspersky, McAfee, Norton, and Microsoft Windows Defender Security Center.
In our own hands-on malware protection test, BullGuard showed improvement.
When last tested, it scored 8.2 of 10 possible points.
This time around, it brought that score up to 9.3 points, the same as and Kaspersky.
It still doesn't challenge the perfect 10-point score earned by Webroot SecureAnywhere Internet Security Plus, though.
One excellent way to protect against malware is to keep it from ever reaching the PC.
To test this protection layer, we start with a feed of malware-hosting URLs supplied by MRG-Effitas , checking whether the antivirus blocks access to the page, eliminates the malware download, or does nothing.
BullGuard's total detection rate of 93% is better than the current average, 79%.
However, 11 other products have scored even higher.
McAfee and Vipre are the big winners here, each with 100% protection.
Phishing websites mimic secure sites in hopes of tricking you into entering your login credentials.
Yes, it’s possible to train yourself to spot these frauds, but it’s nice to have help from your antivirus utility.
We test phishing protection using the most recent available reported frauds.
Over the past several years, BullGuard’s scores have been all over the map in this test, but the latest results proved to be a new low, with just 5% detection.
Chrome, Edge, and Firefox all managed better than 80% detection of the same samples.
Among recent products, F-Secure and McAfee hold the record, with a perfect 100% detection rate.
See How We Test Security Software
Other Shared Features
The Safe Browsing component is what steers your browser away from dangerous or fraudulent websites.
It also marks up links in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Facebook, so you can avoid clicking dangerous ones.
Many security suites, such as Avira Free Security, Bitdefender, and Kaspersky, seek out and apply missing security patches.
BullGuard treats vulnerability scanning differently, looking for security problems with your system configuration.
It warns if you've disabled automatic Windows updates, flags insecure Wi-Fi connections, lists unsigned device drivers, and more.
Most modern security products include a gaming mode that suppresses notifications, scheduled scans, and updates when you're playing a full-screen game.
BullGuard takes this concept further with a Game Booster module that promises to "protect your gaming experience from framerate drops caused by other programs." Note that this feature requires at least four CPU cores.
Basic Firewall
BullGuard's firewall component correctly defended a test system against port scans and other web-based tests, hiding all ports by putting them in stealth mode.
However, that's no great feat, as the built-in Windows Firewall can do the same.
The firewall's program control component automatically defines rules to allow network access for some known programs and Windows components.
But you'll have to tell it what to do about any unknowns.
BullGuard's firewall pop-up asks whether to allow or block each unknown program's network access.
We prefer the more advanced program control found in Norton and Kaspersky.
These products automatically configure permission for trusted programs, wipe out malicious programs, and perform their own analysis on unknowns.
When you click to view firewall settings, you see a simple on-off switch, along with two feature checkboxes, both of which are checked by default.
Leave them checked.
If you un-check the first one, BullGuard won’t automatically create rules for known programs, meaning you’ll see more pop-ups.
And if you uncheck the second, it won’t limit its notifications to those that are important, again meaning you’ll see more pop-ups.
Those are the Basic settings.
If you click the Advanced button, you can turn off the feature that sends programs to BullGuard for analysis when you click Allow or Block.
You also gain access to a page of security-related options such as enabling or disabling attack detection and automatically blocking intruders.
Don’t touch these; they come configured correctly out of the box.
Back in the main window’s Firewall panel you can also choose Manage Rules.
This brings up a daunting list of all program rules, both those created automatically by BullGuard and those based on your Allow and Block choices.
This is where you fix things if you blocked a program in error.
A malicious code monkey might get around firewall and other security protections by simply turning them off, but BullGuard defends against this sort of attack.
Its important Registry keys resist modification, and while I managed to delete some Registry keys, it recreated them as needed.
When I tried to kill its 11 processes, it denied access to all 11.
The Stop option was completely absent from eight of its essential Windows services; trying to stop the ninth got an access denied error.
A trickier way to shut down services involves setting the startup type to Disabled and then forcing a reboot.
BullGuard resisted this attack as well.
This firewall is basic in its functions, but it's tough.
Dated Parental Control
Not everyone needs parental control.
Some suites, recognizing this fact, don't even install it by default.
With BullGuard, it's fully available and integrated, but it does nothing unless you configure settings for one or more Windows user accounts.
This feature seems to have stagnated for years.
Screenshots taken in 2013 look just the same as the current edition.
As with most parental control systems, BullGuard’s offers a content filter that can block inappropriate websites.
Parents can choose one of three age ranges to set a predefined profile or pick and choose from the 24 categories for a custom configuration.
You configure the time-scheduling feature on a tab called Access.
This flexible system lets you impose limits on computer use, or just on internet use.
You can define a weekly schedule of times when access is permitted, set a daily limit for each day of the week, or both.
The scheduler defaults to rather strict limits, effectively a few hours after school and more time on the weekend.
You'll want to look carefully to determine whether those limits work for your family.
On the Applications tab, you can set BullGuard to block the use of specific programs.
By default, it blocks nine chat programs plus TOR and browser-based chat.
This list really shows how dated the program is.
There is no more AOL Instant Messenger, and I can't believe many kids have even heard of ICQ, mIRC, or Pidgin.
Parents can also choose to block the use of any arbitrary program.
Maybe you're OK with letting your older kids chat online, but you still want to prevent them from releasing too much personal information.
The Privacy tab lets you list things like your home phone, street address, and anything else you don't want the kids noising about.
BullGuard offers a choice of types: Name, Email, Phone, and Credit Card.
However, it stores every item in the same way, with no special formatting for the data type.
After setting up parental control for a test Windows account, I put BullGuard through its paces.
With the time scheduler set to prevent computer access, trying to log in to my fake child account just got the message, “Your account has time restrictions that prevent you from signing in at this time.” However, when configured to just control internet access, the scheduler proved ill-designed.
During times of no internet access, the browser simply displays a big error message saying, "This page can't be displayed." A one-time transient pop-up explains that parental control blocked access; miss it and you'd have no idea what's wrong.
In addition, a child with an Administrator account can evade the scheduler by changing the system time.
Sure, you're not supposed to give Administrator accounts to your kids, but people do, for convenience.
I turned off this feature to make continued testing possible.
BullGuard’s content filter is entirely browser independent.
It had no trouble blocking unwanted sites in a tiny browser that I wrote myself.
It also handles secure (HTTPS) pages with no trouble.
I couldn't find any raunchy websites that the content filter didn't catch.
It even blocked Victoria's Secret, though it allowed access to some less-racy lingerie sites.
I tried doing an end-run around the filter by using several different secure anonymizing proxies, to no avail.
It blocked some based on the Anonymizer category, and others because they were uncategorized.
Parents can't even turn off blocking of Anonymizers and Unknowns.
The application-blocking component is tough.
Kids can't get around it by moving a blocked program or creating a copy with a different name.
However, it has the same visibility problem as the internet time scheduler.
Trying to launch a banned program just gets a small, transient message that parental control blocked it.
Subsequent launch attempts just fail, with no message, which can be confusing if you missed the initial pop-up.
The personal information blocker does work, but it only blocks the exact text string you entered.
For example, if you put in a phone number in the form 555-555-1212, the kid could still send 5555551212.
If you blocked the address "1600 Penn," the kid could write "sixteen hundred." You may be better off just having a talk with the kids about what they should and shouldn't post online.
Many parental control systems handle reporting on children's activity by displaying a summary, with links to dive in for more information on, say, blocked websites, or search terms used.
BullGuard just generates a HTML snapshot of activity at the time you requested the report.
The list of all sites visited is tough to interpret, because BullGuard throws in advertisers, analytics, and other sites that the child did not actively choose.
If you click the View button, hoping for more detail about an item, all you get is a list of timestamps.
Modern parental control systems like Qustodio and Kaspersky Safe Kids take note of the fact that modern kids use multiple devices.
They let parents define a single configuration profile and apply it to all the child's devices and user accounts.
BullGuard doesn't offer this cross-platform support.
BullGuard's dated parental control system does handle the basic task of filtering out icky content, I'll admit.
But the time scheduler is awkward and can be defeated by a child with an Administrator account.
A child who misses the tiny, one-shot, transient pop-up explaining that BullGuard has blocked internet access, or prevented the launch of a blocked program will wonder what's going on.
The list of chat programs contains some dead services and other very dated choices.
If you truly need parental control from your security suite, consider Norton or Kaspersky Security Cloud.
New Secure Browser
New this year, BullGuard includes a Secure Browser component, designed to isolate your online financial activities.
When you launch Secure Browser, it spends a short while “creating a secure environment.” Once it loads, you see a dark-themed browser window with tiles for your favorites.
It comes prepopulated with Amazon, eBay, and AliExpress, so you’re not confronted with a big blank.
This browser doesn’t support extensions, and its settings are minimal.
Bitdefender’s Safepay and Kaspersky’s Safe Money serve the same purpose as Secure Brower.
However, if you start to open a known sensitive site in an unsafe browser, Safepay and Safe Money both jump in with an offer...
