F-Secure Anti-Virus Review

Our Verdict

F-Secure Anti-Virus offers splendid malware protection at a bargain price, but it has a heavy organization load and a high imitation-positive rate.

For

First-class malware detection
Fast scans
Ii malware scanners
Clean, bright interface

Against

Heavy system slowdowns
High rate of false positives

Tom's Guide Verdict

F-Secure Anti-Virus offers first-class malware protection at a bargain toll, but it has a heavy system load and a high imitation-positive rate.

Pros

+
Excellent malware detection
+
Fast scans
+
Ii malware scanners
+
Clean, bright interface

Cons

-
Heavy arrangement slowdowns
-
Loftier rate of false positives

With almost-flawless malware detection, F-Secure Anti-Virus (starting at $40 for a year) provides very adept protection from online attacks by using two anti-malware engines at once to increase the threat coverage. Notwithstanding while the program is one of the fastest at scanning a computer, information technology saps too much performance from the organisation and delivers besides many annoying false positives.

Costs and What's Covered

F-Secure Anti-Virus costs $40 to protect upwardly to 3 PCs for a year, or $67 for two years, which is cheap for a program with such good protection. Information technology'due south supported on Windows XP (32-bit Service Pack 3), Windows Vista (Service Pack 2) and all editions of Windows 7, Windows 8/eight.ane and Windows x.

The company offers ii pricier Windows antivirus products that add specific protections, platforms and features. F-Secure Cyberspace Security costs $50 for one PC, or $seventy for iii, and adds parental controls, the visitor's URL scanner, a home network scanner, real-time customer support and a hardened browser for online financial transactions.

F-Secure SAFE takes this all-inclusive approach a step further with a Web-based business relationship and the ability to protect Macs and mobile devices (iOS, Android and Windows Telephone). A year'southward subscription costs $70 for iii devices, $90 for five and $110 for seven.

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Antivirus Protection

As with so many of its competitors, F-Secure Anti-Virus has three levels of protection. Notwithstanding, information technology adds a unique twist. The defense starts with traditional malware-signature matching, but in addition to using F-Secure's homegrown signature scanner and database, the company licenses another from a third party. This increases the detection rate when the software is looking for threats.

Anything that slips through is subject to DeepGuard, F-Secure'south ain behavioral monitoring, which looks for the telltale signs of an infection. Finally, the company's deject-based system quickly examines anything suspect from F-Secure'southward tens of millions of users and distributes several incremental updates daily. (You can opt out of the collection program in the software's Privacy department.)

F-Secure Anti-Virus' chief interface window allows for an firsthand browse in one click, but the default is for a quick browse of the system files and folders, as well as awarding installation folders. You'll demand to dive into the Settings section to fully scan the whole system; schedule daily, weekly or monthly scans; or set scans to take place automatically after as piddling as 5 minutes of inactivity.

Scans tin also be gear up to ignore specific apps and files, just the software won't automatically examine an inserted USB drive or SD card. F-Secure Anti-Virus also scans email attachments, and has a sandbox for safely running any suspected malware.

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The software handles pesky potentially unwanted apps and ransomware (a type of malware that prevents users from accessing the organisation unless they pay a "bribe" fee) through its real-fourth dimension behavioral scanning, only information technology lacks the ability to proactively protect primal files from ransomware attacks. For those who don't desire interruptions, there's a Game Mode that stops updates and intrusions during certain activities.

Antivirus Functioning

F-Secure'due south twin antivirus engines provide about perfect protection against malware on all versions of Windows, based on analysis by the European independent labs AV-Test and AV Comparatives. Oddly, F-Secure software was a bit better at disappointment previously unseen zero-day malware than at stopping widespread, known threats.

Still it also registered a remarkably high rate of faux positives — harmless software flagged as malware — on all platforms except Windows 10. Ideally, you don't want any false positives at all.

In the charts below, you can see that F-Secure's malware protection holds its own against two antivirus brands whose products frequently top our rankings.

In September and October 2015, AV-TEST subjected Windows 10 systems to more than i.5 million malware attacks. F-Secure'due south arrangement stopped 100 pct of nada-day attacks in both months. The software also got a perfect 100-percentage score confronting widespread malware in September, but dropped in October to a yet impressive 99.8 percentage. Information technology identified two harmless files as dangerous in October.

In AV-TEST's Windows viii.1 evaluations in November and Dec 2015, F-Secure once again had perfect 100-percent scores against nil-mean solar day malware, and 99.ix- and 99.8-percent effectiveness against widespread malware protection. But those splendid scores were marred by a startling number of false positives — 8 in November and nine in December, well above the industry average of five.

On AV-TEST's Windows 7 tests, F-Secure also had perfect scores against zero-twenty-four hour period malware in both January and February 2016. It stopped 99.9 percent of widespread malware in Jan, and 100 per centum in February, but racked upwards an annoying vii false positives over both months.

F-Secure flew through AV-Comparatives' Windows 7-based "existent-world" tests, stopping 100 percentage of online malware in both February and March 2016 testing. But once again, the perfect scores were offset by v false positives in each calendar month.

Security and Privacy Features

F-Secure Anti-Virus includes protective browser extensions for Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, but not for the less oft used Opera or Microsoft Edge. Each extension uses F-Secure's SafeSearch engine to check the reputation of a web destination before loading a page.

Similar many recent antivirus products, F-Secure Anti-Virus doesn't take its own firewall, but uses the built-in Windows 1 instead. The plan too lacks a hardened web browser for online financial transactions, but that characteristic is included in the Safe and Internet Security products.

F-Secure offers a paid virtual-individual-network customer (Freedome, $50/year for three PCs) and countersign manager (Key, $33/year).

Operation and System Impact

We tested the performance of F-Secure Anti-Virus on an Asus X555LA notebook with an Intel Core i3-4005U processor, 6GB of RAM and a 500GB hard bulldoze belongings 36GB of data. The machine had been upgraded from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10.

F-Secure Anti-Virus eats upward a lot of system resource to do its job. Our custom OpenOffice benchmark test, which matches twenty,000 names and addresses on a spreadsheet, took vii minutes and 58 seconds to complete later F-Secure was installed, just without any active browse running. That's 1 minute and 7 seconds, or 16.3 per centum, slower than the baseline score of half dozen:51, and one of the heaviest passive system impacts nosotros've seen.

System slowdowns were fifty-fifty more substantial while F-Secure Anti-Virus ran active scans. The OpenOffice test finished in 8:20 during a quick scan — 21.6 percent more slowly than the baseline. The benchmark'due south 11:00 completion time during a total scan indicated a slowdown of sixty.6 percent — again one of the biggest we've seen. In other words, this is an AV product that can wearisome down your organisation both when it'south actively scanning and when it's working in the background.

That said, heavy arrangement impacts frequently are the results of very rapid scans — and, indeed, F-Secure Anti-Virus' scans were some of the fastest on the market place. A quick scan of 8,708 key system files took only 8.ix seconds, while a full scan of 108,827 files was done in 9 minutes and 48 seconds.

Interface

F-Secure Anti-Virus' master interface is a bright and open Status window with a radar-scanning motif. As the plan scans, a bar sweeps through a circumvolve underlying a green checkmark, common amidst antivirus programs, indicating that everything is safe.

In that location are prominent Virus Browse and Setting buttons on the chief folio, too as links to the Tools and Statistics sections. The Tools section has adjustments for the DeepGuard feature also as a identify to see quarantined files and the results of recent scans. There'southward a link to submit suspect malware, and you lot can also turn off all of the program's protective features.

The Statistics section shows the results of contempo scans with visually bonny pie charts. Should your arrangement get bogged downward with multiple infections, F-Secure has a complimentary rescue deejay available for burning onto a CD or USB pollex bulldoze. You lot'll need to go online to go the software.

Installation and Back up

It took us vii minutes and 31 seconds, a bit longer than average, to download and install F-Secure Anti-Virus onto our examination system. But don't worry — in that location are no pop-ups, prechecked sign-ups for premium products or attempts to reset your web browser's home page or search engine.

The program'south depression-key question-mark help button, on about screens, lets you search for basic items, such as how F-Secure online malware collection works. There's also a link to an online support page, on which you can enquire a question or search the forum's database.

F-Secure Anti-Virus includes toll-free telephone support, simply the lines are manned only from 9 a.chiliad. to half dozen p.one thousand. Eastern fourth dimension, Monday through Friday. (Many antivirus companies offer 24/7 support.) When we chosen the toll-gratuitous number for the U.S and Canada, we were connected to a technician overseas who seemed to non know there were multiple time zones in North America.

Bottom Line

Capable of stopping about all malware attacks and securing up to three PCs, F-Secure Anti-Virus is a bargain at $40 per twelvemonth. Its dual malware engines chop-chop and effectively scan a organization for malware. Only perhaps F-Secure does its job likewise aggressively, every bit the program slows other organisation processes drastically, and its malware dragnet identified many benign files equally dangerous. For very similar malware protection with a lighter organisation load and fewer false alarms, we'd recommend Bitdefender Antivirus Plus or Avira Antivirus Pro.

Brian Nadel is a freelance writer and editor who specializes in engineering science reporting and reviewing. He works out of the suburban New York City area and has covered topics from nuclear power plants and Wi-Fi routers to cars and tablets. The former editor-in-chief of Mobile Computing and Communications, Nadel is the recipient of the TransPacific Writing Honour.