Having a good antivirus program is an absolute necessity nowadays, but even that alone isn’t enough.

This version of Panda Antivirus doubles up as a good quality small scale security suite as well, as they have included a firewall, antiphishing, and some other features too. The same small program which installs Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition will also install the Pro Edition as well, you also have the option to upgrade from free to pro edition at any time should you choose to do so. The antivirus component is the same for both the free and pro edition.

A lot of the independent antivirus labs include Panda Antivirus among there tested antivirus programs and it gets good marks overall, although it’s not among the top level scorers. Panda’s anti-phishing component includes a URL filter that prevents you from accidentally clicking through to malicious or fraudulent web pages, along with this, the antivirus will tell you if it detects any threats that are known on any webpages you visit.

Another useful feature is the ability to block programs from running if they get detected connecting to any questionable websites. This moves it to Panda’s recycle bin where it can’t run anymore. The firewall component of the software is called a “Community Firewall”. This uses data from all installations to form a central database which automatically configures network and internet permissions for most programs. Sometimes the firewall will pop up to ask you if it’s OK for a program to connect.

Another ability a good firewall should always have is being able to stealth all ports, most firewalls, including windows firewall , will do this, but Panda left some significant ports merely closed, visible to an attacker.

This program is definitely a lot better than nothing at all, but i would suggest supplementing it with other, more reliable programs and merely using it as a second opinion. The pros would be that it is small and lightweight, as it uses cloud storage for its antivirus signatures and also the firewall doesn’t constantly ask you to deal with popups.

Check out full info at CloudAntivirus.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2012 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.