Security for Everyone - Reviewing Panda Global Protection 2010

Carrying on with our Security for Everyone series, our newest entry is Panda Global Protection 2010. After a few years of relative decline, Panda Security has had a period of constant, solid improvement that has received appreciation in terms of technical efficiency. The latest version of their flagship desktop security program has a few aces up its sleeve: a low resource consumption and a new technology called Collective Intelligence that tries to harness the power of cloud computing. But are they enough to make Panda Security's product line competitive again? After a lengthy beta aiming to ensure perfect compatibility with Windows 7, let's see what our guest has to offer.

First impressions

The first impression Panda Global Protection 2010 gives is that of comfortable, rock-solid minimalism. The installation package can be downloaded without filling in too much information on the vendor's site. You can opt not to receive any kind of information from Panda and no additional software is installed. After the mandatory restart, you do get a warning that you should activate your copy of the program but you only get it once. Besides, it is justified, as you need to have an activated copy of Panda Global Protection 2010 in order to update the signature database.

During the installation process, a quick anti-malware scan is run in order to make an initial cleanup of the system. The scan can be interrupted so as not to lengthen the installation time on known clean systems, but it is otherwise a useful idea. Furthermore, it can prove helpful on heavily afflicted systems where other security systems cannot be installed, because this scan is run before making any changes to the registry. Some malware programs try to prevent security software from being installed by blocking access to the registry so, if the system is already infected and no anti-spyware solution is installed, disinfection becomes extremely complicated. The possibility of making some repairs before trying to modify the host system can offer a way out of this deadlock.

When running Panda Global Protection 2010 for the first time, there is no wizard to go through and no initial settings to configure. The main screen does offer a quick overview of the active features, as well as quick access to each module's settings. The default settings are very well tuned and you will rarely need to change anything. Furthermore, many of the relevant settings are automatically detected correctly, thus making it unnecessary to include a first-run wizard anyway.

Ease of use and configuration

There is nothing shiny or classy about Panda Global Protection 2010's user interface. The user interface theme is chosen so as to match Windows 7's look but, unlike that of Norton Internet Security 2010, there is nothing that could set it aside from the crowd in terms of appearance. Even so, one can only appreciate the cleanness and level of polish.

The main screen is divided into five areas, each accessible through a tab bar at the top. The Status area displays an overview of the currently active modules and allows quick access to each one's settings page. It does not offer access to any particular feature, instead delegating this to functions on other screens. Also, it does not offer the option of modifying anything, only access to settings pages. The Scan area allows you to run and schedule scans and detect vulnerabilities. Vulnerability detection is a handy feature that can run a quick check of the system; it displays the security holes the operating system has and allows the user to run Windows Update in order to patch it. The Report and Quarantine areas have a fairly obvious destination. The Services area offers access to e-mail tech support, security bulletins and a suggestion box, as well as offering the option to create a rescue disk.

Among all the available options, it is easy to miss the first brilliant one: the Detect Vulnerabilities option. As I just said, this offers quick Windows Update access for each vulnerability it detects. This is an elegant solution to the famous Windows-is-insecure problem. It is not trivial: regardless of how powerful Panda Global Protection 2010's firewall would be, a shaky system that has more holes than a slice of Emmental cheese will be difficult to secure. Making it easy for novice users to maintain their system up-to-date at least in terms of security updates is certainly an effort to be appreciated. This is not something new as we have seen it in some other guests we've had in this series, but the clean implementation is surely going to be appreciated by users who are not tech-savvy.

Experienced users will be disappointed by Panda's range of customization options. There is no solid separation between basic and advanced settings but that's mostly because there are not too many "advanced" settings to tweak. However, in terms of technology, Panda Global Protection is not exactly a barren desert. They have Collective Intelligence (a feature that we will discuss shortly) and a set of features that come under an umbrella called TruPrevent, both of which try to make malware detection more effective. This is done by trying to detect, analyze and classify previously unknown threats, but only the most basic aspects can be customized. You may feel disappointed if you have a lot of free time on your hands to play with your technical expertise but your grandmother will certainly feel at ease. Each setting is easy to access and, an important improvement over Panda Global Protection 2009, the user's manual is also useful.

Firewall

Panda Global Protection 2010's firewall has the uneasy task of walking on a field ungraciously set up by its predecessors. Panda's previous efforts in the firewall department have not been exactly state of the art. In spite of my attempts to keep an open mind, I did not expect much from Panda Global Protection 2010's firewall module.

As with all of the other modules, the firewall does not have any fancy advanced controls. There are no powerful tools to analyse logs or manage intricate details of port forwarding but the little functionality that is offered is very solid. No information was leaked to scanners regardless of how much I tried to get anything and all the common attacks were promptly dealt with. Innocent pings (sending a few TCP/IP packets to a computer to see if it is online) and other similarly non-threatening operations did not trigger an alert. Trying to disable the firewall from inside the system by killing its process or disabling its functionality also proved to be impossible.

The austere simplicity of Panda's firewall solution hides a very efficient implementation. Known programs are automatically detected without too much fuss and the alerts it does display are not intrusive. All the usual services you need will continue to work, with functions such as network file sharing not requiring any extra care. Usual operations, such as adding exceptions or blacklisting programs are immediately available from the firewall's settings screen.

Antivirus and antispyware features

Panda Global Protection 2010's antivirus and antispyware features have proved to be the most pleasant surprise in this test. The firewall's success was somewhat surprising but this did not weigh too heavily: most of the suites we reviewed so far offered at least a reasonably solid protection, good enough for home use anyway. However, Panda's latest technologies have proved to be very efficient.

The technological spearhead of Panda's solutions is their Collective Intelligence technology. It boils down to this: Panda Global Protection 2010 allows users to report seemingly malicious programs that are detected on their computer. This in particular is nothing new as all modern security programs allow this. What is new is the fact that all these results are processed in real-time and are available at any given moment. As a consequence, Panda Global Protection 2010 only needs to store a minimal amount of information on the hard drive, and can rely on information gathered from the cloud at any given moment (as long as it is connected to the Internet). Final result? Less occupied space, smaller impact on the host computer and a vast amount of statistical information which can provide almost perfect proactive detection. However, in order to get the best results, the computer needs to be connected to the Internet so as to have access to this huge amount of data. This has the potential of limiting usefulness on systems affected by malware which blocks or restricts network traffic.

Panda Global Protection 2010 is also given a boost by the TruPrevent features, which attempt to provide protection against yet unknown threats by employing various other well-established techniques. TruPrevent does require more memory (Panda Security recommends 1 GB), but the performance impact can barely be felt on systems that provide enough memory. On the other hand, the 512MB test system was indeed struggling to keep up at times.

Coupled with a very good reaction time, this makes Panda Global Protection 2010 have a very good anti-malware module. It even performed better than Norton Internet Security 2010, managing to block just about everything I threw in.

When left idle, Panda Global Protection 2010 will rarely take up more than 15-20 MB of memory, and even in full use it will rarely spike past 60-70 MB, with an almost negligible CPU impact. On the downside, scanning takes a long time, but given the barely noticeable performance impact, it can be safely ran in background for as long as it is required. The long scanning time is also a consequence of having to connect to the global network. Regardless of how fast the Internet has become and regardless of how trendy cloud computing is, relying on any kind of network to do the work will introduce some lag. However, this lag is present only in some operations. Real-time protection is not affected, thus making it possible to integrate with software like instant messaging programs where lagging is intolerable.

The active protection feature also deserves a note that points out how prompt it is. I actually had to disable Panda Global Protection 2010 in order to get the infected samples on the computer as they were immediately wiped.

Verdict

I think that Panda Global Protection 2010 deserves the "Buy for Grandma" award in this incarnation. The Windows 7-blessed version was quite certainly worth the wait. While not having the benefit of major technological breakthroughs, the long experience in providing desktop-level personal security solutions has given Panda Security an edge through the easy-to-use and familiar interface.

Panda Global Protection 2010 packs a remarkably solid set of features behind an equally well-structured interface. It offers elegant solutions to several current problems, such as securing a system that is not up-to-date or processing the huge number of potential security threats detected by guessing. Even if it is not innovative in the technologies it uses, with the exception of Collective Intelligence, everything that Panda Global Protection 2010 offers is solid, well-polished and carefully optimized, offering excellent protection with very few hassles. If you want to give it a try, you can download a trial version here.

Purchasing options:

You can buy this product from Amazon US (if you are from North America) or from Amazon UK (for European countries). When you are buying from Amazon, 7 Tutorials will also receive a small affiliate commission which will help pay for some of our work on the site. A big thank you to all of you who are buying using these links.

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