System utilities

CA Internet Security Suite 2007

Release date: 10 March 2008

By Robert Vamosi, CNET.com
Monday, March 10, 2008 11:17 AM

5.3 Editors' Rating

CA, formerly Computer Associates, redesigned its product line for 2007 and repackaged its Internet security suite as CA Internet Security Security 2007. It provides antivirus, antispyware, antispam, and personal firewall protection, but there are many omissions, such as antiphsihing and antirootkit protection. Online parental controls are available from an optional download.

Despite a clever advertising gimmick promising up to $6,500 in total Internet protection, $5,000 in identity-theft protection, and $1,500 in antivirus protection (see the CA site for all the disclaimers and the very fine print), we're not convinced CA Internet Security is the best protection on the market today. We found it too easy to get the protection status screen to display "Protected" after aborting our antivirus and antispyware scans. We still recommend ZoneAlarm Internet Security 7 for the best all-around protection.

Installation and setup
We downloaded and installed CA Internet Security 2007 in a matter of minutes, but there are a few gotchas along the way. First, you must accept the CA end user license agreement, then a Lesser General Public License agreement for two open-source libraries; failure to accept one or both will not allow you to continue. In order to qualify for the advertised insurance guarantees from CA, you must also submit a detailed registration form to both CA and Mobile Lifeline, which handles the security insurance, requests an e-mail address as well as a physical address.

For $69.99, CA allows you to install the product on up to three PCs. CA Internet Security runs on Windows 98 through XP, requires 60MB to install and 256MB of RAM to run. Parental Controls, which is a separate feature, requires an additional 25MB of hard drive space to install and only runs on Windows 2000 and XP.

This is an overview window. By clicking a topic, say Personal Firewall, CA will open a new window with the Personal Firewall settings.

The new interface is more a table of contents, giving you updated status reports on four areas: antivirus, antispyware, firewall, and antispam. If you purchase any of the individual products, you'll realize that CA Internet Security 2007 has slapped an overview window on top of, say, the CA Antivirus application. By clicking individual topics, you are taken to a new window with more specifics about the topic selected. This seems very old school--even McAfee has updated its interface to contain all activities within one window--and shows that the security tools are not integrated well. The downsides are that the suite as a whole takes up more system resources and that you have several open windows on your desktop.

As with Trend Micro Internet Security 2007, we had too much trouble engaging the CA Personal Firewall out of the box. We could not update the product because we could not connect to the Internet; we needed to reboot first. Only then did CA recognize that our laptop was connected to a new network and asked us to declare this network as safe or not. This should have happened upon installation. Once we marked our network as safe, we were able to update our program.

Should you want to remove CA Internet Security 2007, CA does not provide an uninstall icon. Using the Windows Control Panel Add or Remove Programs tool, you have to remove only one product (assuming all the check boxes are marked). Oddly, during uninstall, CA denied Firefox access to the Internet; only after telling it to allow Firefox did the uninstall process complete. After a reboot, we found that CA left behind no traces.

Features
Of all the Internet security suites we installed and tested, CA Internet Security 2007 took the longest to get rid of the Attention Needed flags on the overview page. Unfortunately, we found that we could cheat the process by canceling our antivirus and antispyware scans prematurely. And we found many security protections to be missing.

Our antivirus scans took forever to run. After aborting an antivirus scan three-quarters of the way through, we were surprised to see the CA Internet Security window indicate that we had finished our antivirus scan and certify us as protected. We decided to test this on other machines and found that we could fool the antivirus status to report Protected after aborted scans on other installations. We consider this a serious design flaw.

In the past, CA has partnered with ZoneLabs for use of their award-winning ZoneAlarm firewall; not so this year. CA has created its own personal firewall, and we could not enable it after installation.

As for antispyware protection, CA renamed PestPatrol, which it purchased a few years ago, to CA Antispyware. After running a scan, we immediately disagreed with some of its findings. In particular, we found LogMeIn, a commercial remote access tool, marked as a low threat to our system, in league with Difisim, a CA-identified Trojan horse. If we accepted CA antispyware's findings, we would lose the ability to connect to our laptop remotely and might not realize that until after the fact. Oddly, by not accepting CA's findings--by not removing or quarantining any of the potential spyware items CA found--we found that the CA Internet Security overview window said our system was now fully protected. Clearly the products are not integrated well if they produce such easy false positives.

CA's antispam protection consists of a toolbar add-on for Outlook and Outlook Express. There is no support for either Eudora or Thunderbird, and we found no way to tweak the antispam settings. In general, we found the configuration options to be minimal.

Missing are several tools found in other Internet security suites. There is no protection against IM-launched virus attacks, no antiphishing protection provided, nor did we find mention of any antirootkit protection. In our opinion, these are serious omissions.

Performance
In terms of antivirus protection, CA Antivirus offered a mixed bag, ultimately scoring in the middle range, falling behind Norton and McAfee in most tests and far short of our best performer, Kaspersky Anti-Virus. On our iTunes test, CA Antivirus gained ground compared with last year, taking 206 seconds as opposed to 310 seconds last year. On our Sorensen Squeeze test, CA Antivirus worsened, taking 335 seconds compared to 330 seconds last year. CA Antivirus showed the most improvement with individual file scans, taking only 112 seconds this year as opposed to 221 seconds last year. And with boot speed, CA Antivirus improved, taking 63 seconds over 67 seconds last year. To find out how we test, visit CNET Labs' How we test antivirus software page.

To determine how well a product will protect your PC, we refer to test results from two leading independent antivirus testing organizations. CheckVir.com ranked CA Antivirus as one of six products to earn its Standard rating, which means the product was tested on finding but not removing antivirus threats. CA Antivirus was not reviewed by AV-Comparatives.org.

Support
CA provides support online with access to detailed knowledge base, e-mail support, and live chat support in selected markets. CA also provides telephone support, but with a fee of $29.99 per incident.

Conclusion
CA Internet Security 2007 is a cobbled-together assemblage of existing CA consumer products that fail to integrate into one unified suite. Missing are IM protection, antiphishing, and antirootkit tools, security tools common in other suites we've seen this year. We also found that it was easy to fool CA into thinking our machine was protected, when we knew we had prematurely ended our antivirus and antispyware scans.