Vipre Advanced Security Renewal

[Yolette Langevin]

A: Although the official End-of-Life date for these products is November 30, 2021 these products will continue to function for some time after that date. Because they will be unsupported, however, you will not be able to contact Support for assistance with any issues aside from upgrades, and at some point, the active definition updates will stop working. As a result, we strongly recommend that you arrange to upgrade your systems prior to the EOL date.

A: Most customers of these products have license renewal dates coming up between now and Nov. 30, 2021. Our recommendation is that you wait until your renewal date, and then upgrade as this will be a simple transaction. If, however, your organization is at a particular risk for targeted attacks, you might consider upgrading sooner to take advantage of the advanced protective capabilities of VIPRE Endpoint Security.

A: We will allow customers to renew for 1 year periods up to Nov. 30, 2020, but as any renewal thereafter would have you purchasing a product that will be unsupported for part of its lifetime, after Nov. 30 2020 we cannot in good conscience allow you to renew without upgrading to a supported product. Unfortunately, we cannot offer partial-year renewals either.

A: For VIPRE Antivirus Business and Business Premium, you have essentially two choices: VIPRE Endpoint Security Cloud and VIPRE Endpoint Security Server. VIPRE Endpoint Security Server will be the easier upgrade, as once you have your new license key you can most likely just install the new Server on top of your old installation, and then update your agents. In general, all of your policies and settings will migrate over as is. Upgrading to VIPRE Endpoint Security Cloud is slightly more difficult; we provide a Migration Tool to copy your policies into your new cloud-hosted site and to assist with agent migration, but you do have to run through that migration process (Upgrade Assistance is offered by our Support team). On the other hand, by upgrading to Cloud, you can also retire your former server hardware and free up any maintenance resources allocated to that system, as we will take care of it for you. With Cloud, you also get much more advanced threat investigation and security visibility through our Cloud console. Note also that if you are pressed for time now, you can upgrade to Server now and migrate to Cloud later for a nominal setup fee.

For VIPRE for Hyper-V, there is no direct replacement but our recommendation is to simply install VIPRE agents on your individual client VMs. The purported benefits of the Hyper V-hosted agent were intended to save resources by sharing them at the hypervisor level; in practice, no such performance savings are seen until you are hosting hundreds of VMs on the same hypervisor. Also, the more advanced threat detection techniques must run locally within the VM, for example, the process behavior analysis based on machine-learning techniques.

A: There are a small number of VIPRE customers who purchased longer-term multi-year licenses and who unfortunately have licenses that extend beyond the declared EOL date for these products. We will be proactively reaching out to you to assist with the upgrade process, as we do not want to wait until your current renewal date to make the change.

A: VIPRE wants to make this process as smooth as possible with as little impact on our customers as possible. We have a variety of options and incentives at our disposal to help with the upgrade process, and we encourage you to reach out to our Sales team or one of our amazing partners to discuss your options.

A: We will not be automatically renewing subscriptions for these products. However, when you upgrade to VIPRE Endpoint Cloud or VIPRE Endpoint Server, we will be happy to re-enroll you in our auto-renew program for continuous protection.

A: Endpoint Security is very similar to the product you already know and love, but with several additional advanced features. The most important feature from a security perspective is the fully automated process behavior analysis that can stop even zero-day advanced threats by leveraging machine learning techniques, but you also get add-ons such as DNS Protection, Web Access Control, and Patch Management. You will also get the benefits of a modern, well-supported product undergoing continuous innovation. -protection/endpoint-solutions/

Note that VIPRE Endpoint Security routinely gets high ratings and wins awards across several independent testing agencies such as AV Comparatives, AV Test, and Virus Bulletin. This product is one you can depend on.

A: As of Nov. 30, 2020, these products fall out of General Support and enters the Assisted Support phase. Essentially what this means is that we cannot guarantee that any patches will be produced to fix any product bugs discovered, but that you will still receive full configuration support. For a full definition and explanation, see -resources-legal/resources-product-lifecycle-policy

VIPRE gets high scores for malware protection with some (though not all) independent testing labs, but its other features are mostly underpowered, and can't compete with the best of the rest. If price is top of your priority list, though, the steep first year discounts make it worth a look.

There are big savings to be made if you add devices and extend your subscription. A 10-device, 4-year Advanced Security license is priced at $399.99 for instance, just $10 per device per year (that's the standard price, too, so it won't jump up at renewal time).

Malware often tries to disable any security products it recognizes, so a good antivirus must be able to protect itself from external tinkering. Unfortunately, VIPRE doesn't do this very well, and our tests revealed various weak spots.

These weaknesses can only be exploited if malware is able to run on your system without detection. That shouldn't happen very often, and even if it does, most threats won't make specific efforts to kill VIPRE products. Still, these are security holes we don't see with Bitdefender, Kaspersky or other top providers, and that has to be a concern.

It's looks very basic, but there's no doubt it's easy to use. Move your mouse cursor over the dashboard Scan button, a dropdown menu of Scan options appears (Quick, Full, Custom), and you can click whatever you need. Very straightforward.

Sensible interface design reduces the need to hunt around VIPRE's menus. 'Last scan was 12 hours ago', a status line told us. With some apps we'd need to go look at the logs to remind ourselves what the scan found, but here, VIPRE's text is also a link, and clicking it opened the previous scan report with all its findings.

One reason for this simplicity is that there are barely any extras. The only one we noticed is a Secure File Eraser, turned off by default, which enables securely wiping confidential files from your device.

There are more settings than we expected, too. You can define the types of files the antivirus engine will automatically scan, for instance; automatically scan removable drives as they're inserted; save power by delaying updates and scheduled scans when you're not plugged in; and run a quick scan as soon as possible if a scheduled scan is missed.

While none of this is particularly outstanding, it'll be enough for most users. And if you're tired of overcomplicated security products, weighed down by a host of extras you'll never use, VIPRE's more back-to-basics approach should appeal.

Although VIPRE wasn't top of the detection rate charts, it's worth noting that it had minimal false alarms, only four across all tests. Panda, F-Secure and Trend Micro may have blocked 100% of threats, but they also raised 33, 44 and 63 false alarms respectively, a potential usability hassle.

AV-Test's October 2020 Windows 10 test showed better results, with VIPRE blocking 100% of test threats. Both labs found VIPRE's products had fewer than average false positives, and AV-Test found VIPRE had less of an impact on system speed than most.

Scan times are a little longer than average, though not so much that you're likely to notice. VIPRE took 46 minutes to scan our 50GB of test data, then 3 minutes 44 seconds on the second run. Bitdefender managed 39 minutes on the first scan, falling to 27 seconds next time. Kaspersky was initially faster at 19 minutes 14 seconds, but then took 2 minutes 50 seconds next time.

To test behavior monitoring, we make use of various scripting tricks (run a standard Windows app, which launches PowerShell, then uses it to download and run a malicious file). VIPRE didn't stop as many of these at the behavior level as Bitdefender or Kaspersky, but it did better than others, and all malicious downloads were detected as soon as they reached our hard drive.

There wasn't such good news with our custom ransomware, though. Bitdefender and Kaspersky both spotted this within a fraction of a second, killed its process and recovered the very few files our test threat managed to encrypt. VIPRE did precisely nothing, allowing it to encrypt more than 11,000 test files.

This doesn't mean VIPRE can't protect against ransomware, or even brand-new ransomware; it's 100% result at AV-Test shows it mostly performs very well. The company could even argue that because our sample wasn't 'real' malware, it made the right decision by allowing it to run.

What this does suggest, though, is that Bitdefender and Kaspersky are more cautious in how they handle suspect behavior, and more likely to raise the alarm than allow a potential threat to continue. And when you're thinking about ransomware, that's the approach we prefer to see.

VIPRE Antivirus Plus is stripped back, easy to use and has some decent independent lab test results. However, it doesn't really stand out in any area, and the lack of self-protection against malware attacks makes it difficult to recommend.

Despite these extras, there's little change to the interface. VIPRE Advanced Security looks and feels almost identical to Antivirus Plus, with just the addition of a Firewall option in the left-hand sidebar, and additional Firewall, Updates and Email pages in the Settings area.

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