Vipre Security
Floriana Grundy
VIPRE develops cybersecurity products focused on endpoint and email security along with advanced threat intelligence applications. VIPRE is based globally with operations in Clearwater, Florida, Washington D.C., Vancouver B.C., Keele, United Kingdom, Dublin, Ireland, Copenhagen, Denmark, Stockholm, Sweden, Amsterdam, Netherlands and in Oslo, Norway.[3]
In 2017 they were concentrating on their VIPRE suite[7] and the company now uses that name. The VIPRE portfolio now encompasses endpoint security, with heritage from original Sunbelt Software anti-virus products, email security, with heritage from the UK company Fusemail, Comendo, StaySecure, WeCloud, iCritical and ElectricMail products that had previously been acquired by j2, and security awareness training via the acquisition of Inspired e-Learning.
With a rich history dating back nearly 30 years, VIPRE Security Group has been defending consumers from online security threats since the internet was in its infancy. Today, VIPRE delivers unmatched protection against even the most aggressive online threats.
VIPRE meets all of your security needs with one cohesive portfolio of solutions. We enable you to combine maximum protection for your end users with seamless purchase, deployment, management and technical support.
Protecting your email systems has never been easier with VIPRE Email Security solutions. Reduce the amount of time spent of securing your email-related tasks for both employees and IT, enjoy an easy-to-use interface built for user experience, and protect the most targeted attack vector from accidental or malicious acts. Any time, on any device, from anywhere.
Discover security vulnerabilities in the third-party applications you leverage each day. All inbound messages are scanned for viruses, malware and other suspicious content. Outbound filtering can be enabled for an additional layer of protection. VIPRE SLA guarantees 100% known virus protection and at least 99.9% spam prevention.
Our suite of cybersecurity solutions provide comprehensive protection against evolving threats beginning with your foundation and expanding to the outer edges of your organization. Email Cloud and Endpoint solutions, including email spam and virus filtering, and encryption provide layers of protection. Additionally, our award-winning security awareness training builds a culture of security consciousness providing you with the most complete cyber defense available. These unified technology platforms provide you the flexibility to choose the optimal suite of protection capabilities for your business.
For most environments, VIPRE takes care of updating your defs easily and automatically. If you maintain an air-gapped environment or have other security constraints, however, you may need to use our manual definitions downloads to keep your VIPRE environment updated with information about the latest threats.
Vipre follows a clear pricing model and their site gives a clear overview of their EDR platform's features. Setup is quick and agent deployment takes only minutes. Sadly our Vipre agent had issues with updates and threat detection.
Vipre EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) is one of their flagship products. The main website describes their platform as 'easy to use' and 'resource sensitive'. Has Vipre produced one of the best endpoint security software platforms, or is this snake oil security.
When we visited the main product page for Vipre EDR, we were pleased to see that there's a basic pricing model of $60 per seat, for up to 10 seats, billed annually via automatic subscription, unless you email to cancel .This makes Vipre EDR one of the more competitively priced EPP (Endpoint Protection Platforms) we've reviewed.
Interested parties who want to try out the platform can request a demo via the main website, to test out the interface and simulate attacks. You can also request a trial of Vipre EDR in order to run your own tests, as we did in order to write this review.
Vipre develops a number of cybersecurity products, so we were grateful to find a dedicated page on their site comparing the features of their Vipre EDR (the focus of our review) with Vipre ESC (Endpoint Security Cloud) and Vipre Endpoint Security Server.
The Vipre website also has an excellent overview of the platform, which clarifies that Vipre EDR has all the anti-malware capabilities contained in their ESC platform. This includes AI-driven malware detection, network intrusion detection, DNS protection, web exploit detection, and anti-spam engines.
Vipre also claims the platform has additional security measures, including correlation engines that combine raw events, security events, and contextual data to identify zero-day, "living-off-the-land", and gray zone threats not detectable by regular antivirus.
These are bold claims, which we were eager to explore in our tests. During setup (see below), we were able to confirm the platform's other advertised features such as application scanning, a remote shell to allow network managers to perform operations on endpoints, as well as patch management tools.
There's a dedicated trial signup page for Vipre EDR. The website requires a 'business' email address in order to receive a link which caused issues for our reviewer, who's a long-time GMX user but the good people of Vipre were happy to help us to set up a trial account on the beta version of the platform.
Currently agent software is available for both Windows (from Windows 7 SP1 onwards) and macOS. We were sorry to see that Linux and mobile devices weren't listed, though we later learned the console has an excellent mobile interface (see below).
When downloading the installer (in MSI format) for Windows, we had a slight comedy of errors, as Microsoft Edge warned us that the file wasn't "commonly downloaded". We imagine Vipre will want to speak to Microsoft about this false positive, as the agent is legitimate software.
Although the installer told us the process would take several minutes, the agent was up in less than 30 seconds. We say 'up' rather than 'up and running', as upon launching we tried to run updates to threat definitions, only for the update to fail. We tried several times more, disabled our VPN and even used a cellular connection with the same result.
After removing and reinstalling the agent, we next attempted to manually update the threat definitions by downloading a data file directly from Vipre's dedicated page. In practice this feature exists for security reasons e.g. to update air-gapped networks but we felt it was the best way to run the update. Once again, however, the update failed. This meant we were unable to run any security scans, as this required an updated threat database.
We were also surprised to see that the agent claimed that Vipre's "Active Protection" feature wasn't switched on, as the policy supposedly used by the agent ('VSM Laptop'), should have had this enabled.
Having lamented the Vipre Agent's inability to update itself or scan for threats, we can't praise Vipre EDR online portal enough. As readers have learned, the main dashboard provides an excellent broad brush overview of endpoints.
The top pane is devoted to vital information like the number of quarantined threats, infected devices and those which need attention for other reasons e.g. to run updates. The 'Protection Summary' is also displayed via a helpful graph, which shows both scan and threat counts.
The left hand pane provides easy to understand menu options, broken into sections: for instance, the 'Monitor' section from where you can access the Dashboard also contains options for 'Quarantine' and 'Reports'.
You can access 'Devices' via the 'Manage' Section. From here you can filter devices by platform, operating system, status or active policy. Users can also click in to a device name to view a clear, well laid-out summary of relevant data such as the device status, scan, threat definitions and when the device was last seen.
Vipre were also keen to point out to us that they've gone to great lengths to make their UI smartphone friendly. We fired up an iPhone 14 Pro Max and were so impressed by the more compact version of the interface, not to mention the fast loading times.
As we mentioned, we were unable to update the Vipre Agent's threat definitions, so were unable to scan for threats. Nevertheless we opened Microsoft Edge on our test machine and attempted to download the fake virus in compressed (ZIP) format.
The Vipre Agent immediately detected the threat and displayed a pop-up notification to say the file had immediately been quarantined. We clicked to view more details and received a detailed rundown of the file itself, which programs had tried to launch it and actions taken.
Our next test was to try to copy a new, real trojan virus that we'd caught in the wild to the test machine's 'Downloads' folder. We do this to make sure that endpoint security platforms can detect and prevent threats based on a file's behavior, not just by comparing it to known threats in an online database.
When reviewing this platform, we tried to bear in mind that we were reviewing a beta version of the platform. The issues we encountered such as installing the agent software don't exist in the current production environment. To Vipre's credit, they did offer to showcase a standalone demo of Vipre EDR to us, to simulate detection and prevention of real threats.
We decided against the demo, as we believe it's fairest to run our own tests on all endpoint security solutions we review but are sure that we'd have had a fewer setup issues and a better experience of all Vipre EDR has to offer if we'd gone for a singing, dancing demo.
Agent installation and updates aside, Vipre can be very proud of the interface they've created. Not only is it easy to navigate but it's punctuated with colorful infographics which detail exactly the right amount of information about devices, threats and much more. We were also very impressed by the mobile version of the console website, allowing admins to manage endpoints on the go. Still, if the agent software needs to be installed three times on every endpoint to get it running, this could cause extra hassle for network managers.