F-secure Internet Security Review

[Geneva Andreotti]

FSecure has dropped its Anti-Virus program and no longer supports or upgrades its Internet Security software if it was purchased before Feb 14, 2023. You can re-purchase F-Secure Internet Security and take advantage of its new antivirus engine, app layout, and advanced tools. You can also choose F-Secure Total Security, the all-in-one security suite that F-Secure is trying to slowly direct all its users to purchase.

These changes have created some confusion, especially among F-Secure users that have enjoyed the protection and benefits of F-Secure Anti-Virus for so long. Lucky for you we've continued our testing and evaluation of all F-Secure products and can help you learn about the tools included in each, how well it protects, and any issues we've found that you should consider before buying an F-Secure antivirus solution.

F-Secure Internet Security comes with several advanced protection tools that we feel are important to have in antivirus solutions. These include a firewall, banking tools, and even parental controls. You can choose to protect a single device with Internet Security, but F-Secure also has options all the way to 25 protected devices. F-Secure Internet Security starts at $49.99 for one device for one year, though its renewal is only $10 more making this antivirus solution one of the better overall values when it comes to computer protection

It's unclear if F-Secure will continue supporting Internet Security in the future. For now, as long as you purchase, or repurchase the program, after Feb 2023, you'll still be able to take advantage of any updates, including to any malware database it uses for real-time protection, and 24/7 live support for any issue that might pop up.

In the past, F-Secure has offered its advanced antivirus solutions in multiple downloads. This means you would have to install some tools separately, like parental controls. F-Secure now truly bundles all these features together into one program making it much easier for users to get started and use from a single dashboard.

The F-Secure app has a lot of white space, so it doesn't feel overwhelming, and just enough color to make you feel comfortable while also taking F-Secure seriously. There are sections of text, including some text links, scattered around the dashboard which doesn't help with overall navigation. This can get frustrating for a new user that isn't familiar with how antivirus programs work.

We tested the overall security of F-Secure using our own test files. Some of these contained known malware while others, like our ransomware file, only simulated true threats without being a true threat. This is important because antivirus companies routinely create test files of their own that their antivirus software easily blocks. Using files that antivirus software has never seen before gives us a better look at its true ability to stop malware.

During the testing of F-Secure, our test executables used all kinds of very suspect tricks - launch one Windows tool, which launches PowerShell, scripting it to use another Windows tool to download a malicious file - and F-Secure jumped on most of these, raising an alert and killing the process so it couldn't cause any more damage.

For our next review, we launched our custom ransomware simulator. As the simulator has never been publicly released, F-Secure couldn't have seen it before, in theory making the threat far more difficult to detect.

F-Secure has blocked our simulator from its file signature in the past but missed it this time. Our test threat launched successfully and encrypted thousands of user documents without F-Secure's behavior monitoring raising any red flags.

F-Secure's Protected Folders system enables defining specific folders which the app says are then "protected from encryption blackmail (like ransomware.)" That would surely protect our test data, right? Nope: our simulator encrypted them all.

These results must be interpreted with care. We know from lab testing that F-Secure blocks most ransomware without difficulty, even the most sophisticated of zero-day threats, so it seems odd that our tiny simulator got through. As it isn't real malware, perhaps F-Secure believed it was a legitimate application, maybe a genuine encryption tool, and so allowed it to run unrestricted.

Still, while we can't be sure what happened or why, these results make us a little nervous. When an antivirus is faced with an executable file it's never seen before, engaging in very ransomware-like behavior, and encrypting files within a protected folder, we would expect it to at least raise an alert, asking the user if this was okay. The fact that didn't happen has to be a concern.

Independent test labs, like AV-Comparatives and AV-Test, had more success than we did with F-Secure in their evaluations. Both gave perfect, or near-perfect overall scores. Neither showed that F-Secure struggled to identify or block existing, new, or unknown threats. Combining all these findings together, we feel F-Secure overall is a very, solidly secure antivirus program.

When you first install the program, F-Secure automatically begins scanning your entire device while also offering a quick walk-through of the program. On top of malware, F-Secure will check your entire system and look for any vulnerabilities on your computer where threats like worms, ransomware, and hackers can sneak through. You'll be given a list of recommended fixes, and F-Secure will offer to fix them for you if you'd like.

F-Secure has a few scanning options that are also speedy, accurate, and easy to use. Even the first scan will take less than 10 minutes to run whereas other programs, like Bitdefender, take up to 45 minutes, or sometimes an hour. It supports scheduled scanning that allows the package to automatically check the system

You can run targeted scans by right-clicking a file, folder, or drive and choosing Scan For Viruses. These, too, are speedy, even initially, and get faster in subsequent runs. The app checked 50GB of executables in around 19 minutes at first, for instance, faster than most, dropping to 14 minutes when we checked again.

When you visit a known banking website, F-Secure disconnects all untrusted applications from the internet and prevents them from going back online while you're there. It also blocks untrusted websites until your transactions are complete.

These are drastic steps, but an alert warns you what's happening, and F-Secure highlights your screen with a green border as a reminder. Banking protection ends automatically when you leave the site, or you can shut it down manually with a couple of clicks if it's interfered with any legitimate apps.

You also get parental controls with two important parts. The first is web filtering. You can click the various content presets to quickly block webpages about abuse, drug and alcohol use, pornography, or gaming websites.

There are both white and black lists that you can use to further customize content access. We've found that some websites slip through the filters, so we simply add the URL to the blacklist to ensure kids can't view them. On the other side, there are some gaming websites that we are okay with our kids playing, so we add these to the whitelist while keeping the majority of the gaming sites securely blocked.

The other controls in this feature let you set time limits for when and how long your children can use the internet. While your child is online, they will receive warnings about when their time is about up to help with the transition.

F-Secure Internet Secure is missing some tools that we would like to see included at this level. These include a password manager and Wi-Fi protection. These are reserved, however, for Total Security users.

F-Secure Internet Security is fairly priced, compact, easy to use, and with mostly positive results from the testing labs, but unexpected review issues including its ineffective Protected Folders system leave us with some concerns. We do like the few extra features it includes, mainly the safe banking tools and parental control, though we would like to see just a couple more.

The jump between Internet Security and Total Security is impressive. Where other antivirus solutions tend to only add a few extra tools, or increase the number of devices you can protect, F-Secure hands you two important feature packages, Privacy and Identity Protection.

A virtual private network (VPN) is a security tool designed to shield your online identity and movements by routing your information through a secured server. As your data is passed through, it is encrypted to prevent anyone from being able to read it. Your device's IP address is also changed so online activity can never be tracked or traced back to you or your device.

Freedome VPN has been tested and reviewed by our VPN test team and while it is limited in many areas compared to the best VPN clients, F-Secure has included tools and features we do like to see in a VPN.

To begin with, Freedome uses the OpenVPN protocol to encrypt data but it doesn't offer the highest level available. Militaries and banks use AES 256-bit encryption to secure their sensitive information and is the level we like to see offered by VPNs. Even though this level isn't used by Freedome, it still encrypts data well enough to make it hard to read if it's ever intercepted.

Our overall security tests showed Freedome kept a tight connection and didn't allow DNS leaks. When we forced the connection to drop, the kill switch was quick to turn on and kept our information shielded until the connection was re-established. This is exactly what we want to see.

One feature we were impressed to see with Freedome is that it doesn't disconnect a server connection when we choose to connect to a second server. Other services drop the first connection, but F-Secrue keeps you solidly secured until the next server connection is made.

The server network is smaller compared to other VPN services. F-Secure doesn't list the exact number of servers it has, but we do know it's limited to only 20 countries. Surfshark has 3,200 servers in 100 countries while Private Internet Access has over 20,000 servers worldwide. There isn't anything wrong with a smaller network, but it can affect when and where you connect and your overall connection speeds.

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