McAfee Internet Security Suite 2005: Upping the Ante for Security Suites Enhancements and Improvements Abound for 2K5 Joseph Moran
The 2005 edition of McAfee's all-in-one Internet security suite features a solid collection of security components, each of which sports a variety of improvements and enhancements over previous releases, but the immediate question for most users remains whether the sum of the parts is really greater than the individual components themselves.
The security suite is made up of four separate components, each with its own specific function. They are VirusScan, Personal Firewall Plus, Privacy Service, and Spam Killer. The components can be accessed individually or manipulated via the McAfee SecurityCenter, which ties them all together into the same interface.
Before getting into the actual software, we'd be remiss not to discuss our experience on the McAfee.com web site, which was maddening, to put it mildly. For example, although McAfee offers 30-day trial downloads of its utilities, it doesn't offer the complete Internet Security Suite 2005 on a trial basis. Rather, you must sign up for and download each of the four components individually, which is a needless hassle considering that many users would likely be interested in evaluating the entire suite.
But obtaining the trial software from McAfee.com wasn't simply a matter of mere inconvenience. After successfully installing one of the four utilities, VirusScan, and returning to the site to download the others (the software must be installed directly from the site, so you can't download the entire application and install it later), we were greeted by a message saying that we were not eligible to download any of the other components. We tried leaving and returning to the site, deleting cookies, and a variety of other methods to resolve this problem, but all to no avail.
To add insult to injury, while on McAfee.com we were subjected to periodic pop-up windows warning us about possible infestation by spyware and other nasty stuff. We expect this kind of "marketing" from unscrupulous or unknown web sites, but we certainly didn't expect it from McAfee's Web site. A check of the pop-ups' source address (ads.mcafee.com) confirmed they were generated by the site rather than some other application previously residing on our system.
One can only speculate as to the motivation behind the McAfee site behavior, but from our perspective it seems that the site is clearly designed to emphasize "buy" over "try" by making the latter option difficult if not impossible. If that was in fact the goal, it ultimately worked, as we resorted to purchasing a copy of the product in a local store in order to perform this evaluation. Whether others would succumb as we did is an open question, and despite real and legitimate concerns about piracy, McAfee should overhaul its site to make evaluating its software less of a hassle for prospective purchasers.
Security Center
The locus of McAfee Internet Security Suite 2005 is the SecurityCenter, where you can get threat advisories, view your protection status, launch individual components, and collect both program and definition updates (if you're not configured to download them automatically).
For each component of MISS 2005, SecurityCenter presents a series of common tasks in plain English, making it a good place to interact with the software if you don't want to deal with a lot of menu and configuration complexity — the individual component interfaces tend to be a bit busy.
SecurityCenter also has the potential to oversimplify things a bit. A good case in point is the Security Index feature, which purports to rate the vulnerability of your system in a number of areas based on various factors, including what components you have loaded, how they are configured, and what threats are currently prevalent on the Internet. Ratings are based on a scale of 1 to 10 for each component and for the system as a whole. However, these ratings can be misleading — after shutting down the firewall completely, you'd expect this to be reflected in a lower index, but it still registered a perfect 10 on all counts.
On Windows XP with SP2 installed, McAfee SecurityCenter is supposed to take over the responsibilities of Microsoft's Security Center, and while it did so on our test system (removing the Microsoft icon from the system tray), it also annoyingly prompted us again upon each system reboot asking to do the same thing. It did this on multiple systems and there was no apparent way available to rectify the problem.
