Security for Everyone - Reviewing G-Data Internet Security 2010

We are continuing with our Security for Everyone series, having G-Data Internet Security 2010 as our guest. G-Data's suite is not that popular and well known, but the company actually has a long history that spans over more than two decades. This is quite impressive if you think that this makes them not much younger than personal computers themselves. Read on to see if this experience eventually paid off.

First impressions

My first impression about G-Data Internet Security 2010 was somewhere along the lines of: "ok... this is big!". The installation package comes remarkably close to 300 MB, so my first though was that this is either very complete or very, very bloated. Fortunately, it turned out to be closer to "complete". Also, I should give it credit for the fact that the installer did not shove anything down my throat. When installing G-Data Internet Security 2010, you can choose not to provide information about your use of the product. The possibility of installing the parental control and file shredding modules is offered without being activated by default, and the installer also offers to schedule periodic, reasonably-timed automatic scans and updates. No additional & unwanted software is offered. The only other question you get after restarting the computer is that which asks for your login details, in order to perform the automatic updates.

G-Data InternetSecurity 2010 has a very simple interface. Its main screen and all of its configuration and monitor screens are extremely concise. All the information you could want is immediately available. It offers a remarkable impression of comfort and simplicity; every possible function is accessible from a single screen, and customization options are offered along the way without being too intrusive. As you will see, G-Data InternetSecurity 2010 tries to do as much automatic configuration as possible with minimal user input. Therefore, the first run will not offer any kind of configuration wizard and you will not be asked to do any setup operation. The only thing you are asked to do is run a first quick scan of the system, in order to ensure smooth operation afterwards.

Ease of use and configuration

The interface also manages to cleverly hide the fairly large range of options by splitting it into several individually-accessible areas. This is a two-bladed sword though, because its other effect is to make it difficult to find the pane that contains that-particular-setting-you-can't-remember-right-now. For instance, you can customize firewall-related settings from three separate settings screens which do not have an unitary look & feel. While not making it unbearable to use the program, it sure scores low on the "attention to detail" scoresheet because you get to browse settings related to the same module in independent settings pages that should have really been gathered together.

Another problem G-Data InternetSecurity 2010 has in the configuration department is the fact that some settings are hopelessly cryptic for novice users. For instance, due to the lack of a wide range of instant messaging clients it can integrate with, G-Data InternetSecurity 2010 provides the option to manually add ports to monitor for instant messaging content. Unfortunately, this is of limited use since your grandmother is unlikely to know which ports Skype uses. Providing at least a list of common choices for this option would have been useful. And the list of cryptic settings does not stop here.

However, G-Data InternetSecurity 2010 is not a complete usability disaster. First of all, its automatic configuration features are almost flawless. If there is something it gets right, that has to be the very little amount of input it requires. It tries to obtain an optimum configuration with minimal user input, so after the first few days of use almost everything will happen under the hood. This is especially useful for those users who play full-screen games, as they are unlikely to be interrupted.

In fact, this impression of minimalism is maintained throughout the entire interface. Everything contains just the right amount of information required. All the settings are concisely explained, with enough details to understand what they do but in just a few words, supplemented by a well-written manual. Alerts are rightfully displayed only when there is something interesting to display, and user input is required only when there is not enough information to reliably make a decision automatically.

One other aspect that I feel I should point out is that G-Data Software maintains an excellent set of security-related information aimed at their novice users. While not a yet-unseen case, this deserves mentioning, because the company's efforts to educate their users have a direct impact over the efficiency of their security suite. Security can offer protection against malware and crackers, but they are unhelpful against easy passwords, incorrectly configured or out-of-date systems and clever social engineering.

Firewall

G-Data InternetSecurity 2010's firewall is very neatly tailored. I had reserves regarding its Autopilot mode, but it turned out to do a remarkably good job. Unfortunately, it did not prove to be as solid as other suites' firewalls.

In Autopilot mode, G-Data InternetSecurity 2010 suddenly becomes silent. It will try to decide whether to allow network access or not based on its own rules, and in spite of my previous experience with firewalls that do this (i.e. several epic fails), after two hours of trying everything I knew, I was forced to call it a day and admit it works. The automatic configuration that G-Data InternetSecurity 2010 does is excellent. Even if it does make a mistake, it can easily be switched to Manual mode, where exceptions can be added through a simple, wizard-like interface. This is useful for users who are sensible to interruptions, like gamers or cinemaphiles, but it can also be useful in other cases when a firewall alert is the last thing you want to see.

However, on the tech side, the firewall is average at best. It did a decent job: all the ports were closed and stealth, the firewall service could not be stopped or deactivated and it responded well to your average script kiddie attack. However, it leaked most of the information to common network scanners (despite popping up a warning that the computer was scanned), and coupled with the rootkit-related problems described below, I have my reserves regarding its overall strength. The only positive aspect that I can point out (besides the good auto-configuration features) is the very low resource consumption of the firewall module.

I should also quickly note that the web protection feature is very paranoid. A few harmless websites considered threatening every once in a while is reasonable, but G-Data InternetSecurity 2010 takes it a bit too far. This is likely to determine some users to ignore all the warnings, including legitimate ones, opening more holes than in patches.

Antivirus and antispyware features

G-Data Internet Security 2010 has a fairly interesting approach to anti-malware protection . It actually uses two anti-virus engines for enhanced protection. This certainly proved effective as G-Data InternetSecurity 2010 correctly detected and removed all the trojans, keyloggers and scanners that I installed on the test system. The only class of malware that was not correctly handled were rootkits: despite detecting all of the ones on the test system, it could not remove three of them.

The other, less obvious advantage of the two-engine protection is the response time. G-Data InternetSecurity 2010 has one of the fastest reaction times as new threats are quickly added to the signature database. This is probably an even more important aspect than that of protection itself. We have seen security suites that have very good detection with a single engine. I also have to point out the fact that two engines also mean a better heuristic detection to the point where I did not get a single false positive (i.e. harmless file mistakenly identified as malware) during the tests.

You might think this is a bit too good to be true and that it has to be a downside here. The downside is in the performance. Two anti-virus engines should mean twice the resource requirements of a usual security suite; of course, the penalty is not exactly a 50% slowdown, but it is noticeable. The active protection feature is not a burden, provided you have enough RAM (minimum requirements are 512 MB but 1 GB is a far safer bet). However, the scans are far slower than anything else we tested. The resource management is quite smart though, as G-Data InternetSecurity 2010 will try to adjust its memory use so as not to have too great an impact. Consequently, even if scanning takes longer, the performance degradation is still not as heavy as I first expected. Nevertheless, while better than expected, G-Data is not exactly the slimmest contestant we had so far, though not the fattest, either. If performance is critical, the option to pause scanning during high loads is available, but de-activated by default. This is a fairly fortunate decision: on entry-level Windows 7 systems, this leads to the funny situation where the system is constantly under a high enough load (especially after the two anti-virus engines start roaring) that full system scans keep getting paused so often that they cannot do anything useful.

Besides these common technicalities, I should also mention the very well integrated instant messaging and e-mail protection. This is a feature that is becoming standard in today's security tools, and G-Data InternetSecurity 2010 is catching up. However, it is only catching up: the instant messaging protection is not as powerful as that found in other security tools. It can only easily integrate with a restricted range of clients. Integrating with others is possible, but only by manually providing the list of ports that the clients use, which is unlikely to be trivial for novice users.

Verdict

The only issues that gave me second thoughts are the few firewall-related ones. Compared to Norton Internet Security 2010 (the current reference of our series), I think G-Data InternetSecurity 2010 is inferior on the firewall side, despite being incrementally better on the anti-malware side. The configuration panes are also less user-friendly. However, due to its exceptional auto-configuration features and the very little amount of user input it requires to function properly, the lack of polish here and there can safely be ignored. I think G-Data Internet Security 2010 can make a good second option if you are willing to lend a hand when configuring instant messaging protection. It offers good protection against anything your grandmother could be afraid of, unless she actually needs a corporate-level desktop firewall. On the plus side, it will ask novice users for a lot less information, require less maintenance and it costs less than just about any decent security solution on the market.

Despite not being technically top-notch and requiring some non-essential usability-level polishing, I think G-Data InternetSecurity 2010 is good enough for non-techies. You can both purchase or download the trial version of G-Data InternetSecurity 2010 from here.

Related articles: