When choosing a security suite, it’s important to consider what types of protection you want as well as what devices you want to protect. F-Secure Internet Security covers the important bases in terms of device protection, with apps for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. However, on all platforms, it offers fewer protective features than the best of its competition. Bitdefender Total Security includes a wealth of features on Windows and supports macOS, Android, and iOS as well. With Norton 360 Deluxe, you get cross-platform security, a VPN with no arbitrary limits, and cloud storage for your backups. You’re better off selecting either of these Editors’ Choice security suites.
At the time of our last review, F-Secure’s product line consisted of the basic F-Secure Anti-Virus, a Windows-only suite called F-Secure Internet Security, cross-platform F-Secure Safe, and F-Secure Total, a bundle of F-Secure Safe with F-Secure’s VPN and password manager.
The new lineup drops F-Secure Anti-Virus altogether, though the company will support existing users. F-Secure Safe also vanishes, and F-Secure Internet Security moves up to take its place, cross-platform features and all. Finally, F-Secure Total becomes an integrated suite, rather than just a loose bundle of separate products.
The products retain their somewhat whimsical user interface, with stylized people, trees, and clouds in the background. However, the company logo has a completely new look.
This product’s pricing starts at $59.99 per year for one license. However, for a cross-platform suite, a five-device subscription is a better match for many users. At $79.99 for five licenses, F-Secure Internet Security is on par with Total Defense Premium Internet Security (an entry-level suite) and Webroot SecureAnywhere Internet Security Complete (a top-tier mega-suite). Entry-level Editors’ Choice Bitdefender Internet Security costs $94.99 per year for five licenses. With Norton 360 Deluxe, Editors’ Choice for a cross-platform multi-device suite, you pay $104.99 per year for five licenses, but that also gets you five VPN licenses with no bandwidth limits and 50GB of hosted storage for your backups.
Need to protect more devices? The main product page shows pricing for three, five, or seven licenses, but if you click for full details, you’ll see that you can subscribe for 10, 15, 20, or 25 devices. At F-Secure’s 10-license level, you pay $92.99 per year, less than any other suite except AVG Internet Security.
The 15-, 20-, and 25-license subscriptions go for $112.99, $126.99, and $139.99 per year. At the 25-license level, you’re paying just $5.60 per license. It’s a good deal if you actually need that many licenses. At that point, though, you should also look at McAfee Total Protection. A $159.99 per year McAfee subscription lets you install protection on every device in your household, whether it runs Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, or even ChromeOS.
For your first F-Secure installation, you’ll create a My F-Secure account online, register your purchase, and download the product. After that, you can add more devices from within the main program by sending a link via email or text. You can still log in to My F-Secure to download protection for a new device, but in the current scheme of things, it’s less important than it once was.
With the previous round of changes, F-Secure Internet Security had a user interface makeover that left it looking completely different from any previous version. For more than ten years, F-Secure’s main window was a simple collection of rectangular panels with varying shades of green and blue on a white background. In the current version, that background is a stylized hilly landscape with clouds and a few trees. A cartoon man and woman sit enjoying their devices below a security status icon, a green checkmark when all is well.
F-Secure still presents three rectangular panels: People & Devices, Viruses & Threats, and Secure Browsing & Banking. There’s a list of recent events to the right of the panels, with an option to click for the full timeline. The main window uses a responsive design, allowing the three panels to move and resize as needed, from a horizontal row of three in a wide window to a three-high vertical stack when it’s narrow.
That green status icon turns red if there’s a problem with your security configuration. That’s a feature common to most antivirus products, but F-Secure takes it a step beyond. When the icon goes red, a red panel depicting a scary rider and horse appears, with advice on fixing the problem, and the cartoon couple in the background point to it in alarm. You certainly won’t miss this warning.
In addition to updating antivirus definitions initially, the app offers to run a quick scan. I declined that offer, preferring to run a full scan. In general, you should always run a full scan right after installing a new antivirus.
Clicking the Scan button on the main window also runs a quick scan. To get a full scan, you start by clicking in the Viruses & Threats panel anywhere except on the Scan button. This brings up a large window from which you can launch scans, check for updates, submit suspect files to F-Secure, and more.
When I did run the full scan, it finished in 30 minutes, an excellent showing given that the current average is over two hours. F-Secure clearly uses the initial full scan to optimize its process—a repeat scan finished in less than two minutes.
Many antivirus tools use a simple progress bar to tell you how the scan goes. Some even estimate how long it will take to finish. F-Secure shows its progress with an unusual circular sweep that escapes its round progress bar to paint the whole window. As in previous tests, I noted that the progress report stuck for quite a long time at 11%, then rapidly sped to completion.
In theory, after that first full scan, you should be able to sit back and rely on real-time protection to fend off future attacks. Even so, you may want to run a regular full scan, just in case. With F-Secure, you can schedule a scan to run every day, every week, or every four weeks. By default, scheduled scans run at a low process priority to avoid hogging resources.
In past years, all four independent antivirus labs I follow have included F-Secure in their regular testing. At present, it only appears in reports from one lab.
Researchers at AV-Test Institute rate products on protection against malware, low-performance impact, and usability. That last category refers to minimizing false positives, legitimate apps, or web pages flagged as dangerous. A product can receive up to six points for each category, with 18 points being the maximum possible score. F-Secure almost earned a perfect 18 points in the latest round of testing but lost a half-point in the performance category. Its total of 17.5 points is enough to earn the label Top Product. Almost half the products in the latest report reached a perfect 18 points, including Avast, AVG, Avira Internet Security, BitDefender, G Data, Kaspersky, McAfee, Norton, and Trend Micro.
The labs use wildly different scoring systems, so I’ve devised an algorithm that maps them all onto a 10-point scale to yield an aggregate lab score. With just one test result, F-Secure isn’t equipped to receive an aggregate score. Currently leading the pack, Bitdefender holds a perfect 10-point score based on results from all four labs. Tested by three labs, Kaspersky comes in at 9.8, while McAfee and Norton achieve 9.7.
F-Secure’s layers of malware protection include signature-based detection of known threats, naturally. But an antivirus with no other means of detecting malware would be vulnerable to every brand-new threat, useless until analysts develop a signature for that threat. F-Secure’s answer to zero-day, never-before-seen malware is the DeepGuard behavior-based detection system.
F-Secure’s online database identifies known good files, and the real-time antivirus wipes out known bad files. DeepGuard kicks in for processes that don’t fit either category—unknowns. Much like the similar component in Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus, it watches unknown processes and puts the kibosh on those that exhibit a pattern of malicious behavior.
For every antivirus review, I run a hands-on malware protection test using real-world samples that I collected and analyzed myself. Some antivirus products start wiping out threats they recognize as soon as the files show up in Windows Explorer. Others wait for a click or wait until the program is about to launch. F-Secure belongs to the former group, and it’s a real speed demon. Within just a few seconds, it wiped out 85% of the samples, though it took a while longer to display the transient popup notifications of each successful detection.
After the initial culling, I launched each remaining sample and noted how F-Secure handled it. Protection layers, including DeepGuard, caught most of the samples, bringing F-Secure to 98% detection and 9.6 of 10 possible points. That’s quite good and just a hair better than F-Secure did in its previous test.
Even so, several products have scored higher against this same collection of samples. Norton AntiVirus Plus tops the list with 100% detection and 9.9 points, while G Data Antivirus and ZoneAlarm came close with 9.8. That leaves McAfee and Webroot jostling for a shared third place with 9.7 points.
For another view on malware protection, I start with a feed of malware-hosting URLs generously supplied by the London-based testing lab MRG-Effitas. I launch each URL, discarding any that don’t load properly, and note whether the antivirus blocks access to the dangerous page, eliminates the malware during or immediately after download, or sits by idly doing nothing. When I’ve got 100 data points, I put the results in for analysis.
One failing of the now-defunct F-Secure Anti-Virus was that it lacked protection against malicious and fraudulent websites. Even so, its Web Traffic protection feature blocked some malware-hosting pages. This suite’s Browsing Protection extension fully supports blocking malicious and fraudulent pages, and the Web Traffic feature put in an appearance as well. F-Secure blocked access to 31% of the dangerous pages, while the regular real-time antivirus axed another 60% at the download stage, for a total of 91% protection.
The informational page that F-Secure displays when blocking a site is the same for malware-hosting pages as for phishing URLs. It warns, “You shouldn’t surf here,” with a shark fin image to hammer home the warning. In both tests, I occasionally found that the browser displayed an error message instead of the warning page, but a quick browser refresh fixed the problem.
F-Secure’s 91% score isn’t bad, but more than a dozen products have done better in this test. , McAfee, Norton, Sophos Home Premium, Trend Micro, and ZoneAlarm Extreme Security NextGen, all achieved perfect 100% protection. Interestingly, ZoneAlarm reached that score by carefully analyzing every download, while Trend Micro blocked almost every item at the browser level.
With ransomware ever more prevalent, I expect any decent antivirus to include some form of ransomware protection. F-Secure offers its ransomware protection in conjunction with DeepGuard, stating that it monitors protected folders to block suspicious activity. You can turn off ransomware protection without turning off DeepGuard but disabling DeepGuard disables them both.
In testing, F-Secure’s real-time antivirus component instantly eliminated all my ransomware samples. However, the real-world worry is that a zero-day attack might slip past the antivirus. I don’t have the hacking skills to gin up zero-day ransomware attacks for every review, of course. To simulate zero-day ransomware, I simply turn off real-time malware detection when testing ransomware protection.
By default, F-Secure protects files in the Desktop, Documents, Favorites, Music, Pictures, and Videos folders for the current user. If your PC has multiple users, you should add those folders for the others as well, along with any additional folders you want to be under protection. To do so, first, click the Viruses & Threats panel on the main window. Scroll down to Ransomware protection and click View protected folders. Now you can add to or edit the list.
Trend Micro, Panda Dome Advanced, and a few others offer similar protection. They don’t hinder known, valid programs from modifying protected files, but if an unknown program tries to make changes, they suspend it and issue a warning. To test this feature, I launched a simple-minded fake ransomware program that does nothing but apply reversible XOR encryption to every text file in the Documents folder. F-Secure didn’t stop it. I also tried editing text files with a hand-coded editor, one that definitely won’t be found on any trusted list. Once again, F-Secure didn’t prevent my changes.
An F-Secure representative explained that ransomware protection is an extension of DeepGuard’s behavioral analysis. Merely modifying a file in a protected folder isn’t enough to trigger it. Other factors must be present that indicate actual ransomware at work.
Confronted with almost a dozen real-world ransomware samples, DeepGuard rose to the challenge, though not perfectly. It completely missed two of the samples. They ran to completion, encrypted tons of files, and left ransom notes in several places. But for all the rest, including a dangerous full-disk encryptor, DeepGuard eliminated the threat before it could do any harm.
The free RanSim ransomware simulator from KnowBe4 challenges ransomware protection utilities by simulating ten encryption scenarios used by actual ransomware along with two legitimate encryption activities. Optimum protection would block all ransomware simulations and leave legitimate activities alone. DeepGuard blocked all the simulations but also blocked legitimate encrypting activities. That’s still quite a success.
Occasionally I encounter ransomware protection utilities that fail when ransomware launches at startup before their protection is engaged. To test F-Secure’s handling of ransomware at startup, I put a couple of the ransomware samples that F-Secure successfully detected into the Startup folder and rebooted. DeepGuard handled both.
It’s unfortunate that DeepGuard totally missed two of the ransomware samples. If F-Secure worked like Trend Micro or Panda, preventing all unauthorized changes to protected files, it would have saved a lot of grief. Do remember, though, that to see this feature in action I had to disable all the other layers of protection. You wouldn’t do that in the real world.
The same browsing protection that detects malware-hosting URLs also aims to steer users away from phishing sites that try to steal their login credentials. Phishing is platform-agnostic. You can fall for a phishing trap on any platform, from a PC to a gaming console to an internet-aware bidet. Smart netizens can learn to recognize fraud, but it’s nice to have some help from your security suite.
To prepare for this test, I scraped hundreds of reported phishing URLs from sites that track such things. I aim to include some verified frauds and some URLs that haven’t yet been analyzed and blacklisted. I use a hand-coded program to launch each URL and record that the antivirus caught it, the antivirus missed it, or it wasn’t a phishing site. I run this test on four systems simultaneously. The product under test protects one, of course. The remaining three rely on the protection built into Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.
F-Secure’s handling of detected phishing pages has improved since my last test. Even so, I sometimes had to refresh the browser to see the informational warning page.
When last tested, F-Secure scored 98% detection, with identical results under Windows and macOS. Results this time were completely different, and not in a good way. F-Secure’s macOS edition scored 80%, while it detected just 70% under Windows. The phishing protection components of Chrome and Firefox both beat that 70% detection rate. Let’s hope this is just a blip and that F-Secure returns to the winner’s circle in its next test. Speaking of the winners, Avast, Trend Micro, and ZoneAlarm all reached 100% in their latest phishing protection tests.
While online security is always important, it’s especially urgent during sensitive online activity such as banking. Quite a few suites offer extra protection to keep spyware from snooping on sensitive online transactions. For example, Bitdefender includes Safepay in all products, starting with the antivirus. At the suite level, Kaspersky offers Safe Money, which specifically isolates the protected browser from other processes.
Safepay in Bitdefender opens a separate desktop for secure browsing. Kaspersky’s Safe Money isolates the browser process from other products, flagging the secure browser with a green border. Both kick in automatically on detecting a financial site.
Banking protection in F-Secure also activates automatically for financial sites, but it operates a bit differently. When you connect to a financial site, it blocks all other connections and displays a banner stating that banking protection is active. You can click OK to shrink the banner down to a green tab at the top of the screen or click to end the protection session.
In testing, it clearly worked. The banner appeared when I opened a bank site, as it should. And when I attempted to connect elsewhere, I got an explanatory page advising me to finish my banking first.
Banking protection does what it promises, but I’m not sure it’s as completely protective as some of the competition. It seems possible that, for example, a data stealer could capture your private data and wait to phone home with it until banking protection ended. The other products mentioned isolate the entire browser process rather than simply preventing other connections.
The days of bloated security dinosaurs sucking up system resources are long over. Most modern products range from zero performance impact to very little. Even so, I find it worthwhile to run some simple performance impact tests.
To measure boot time, I use a script that launches at startup and waits for 10 seconds in a row with less than 5% CPU usage. At that point, I deem that the computer is ready to use. Subtracting the start time of the boot process (obtained by querying Windows) yields the boot time. I average multiple runs with no suite, and multiple runs after installing the suite. With F-Secure installed, the boot process finished in less time than with no suite. A few other products have exhibited this behavior, which I record as a zero, for no slowdown.
Most people let PCs go to sleep when not in use, rebooting only when they must, so an increase in boot time doesn’t necessarily mean much. Slowing down day-to-day file manipulation activities could be more of a drag. To test that, I repeatedly run a script that moves and copies files of many different types and sizes between drives. That script ran just 3% longer with F-Secure installed. A script that zips and unzips the same set of files over and over finished in slightly less time. As with the boot time result, I recorded that as a zero.
Averaging F-Secure’s scores yields an overall performance hit of 1% putting it among the least impactful suites. Even so, Avira, K7 Total Security, and Webroot managed no measurable impact at all, and ESET Smart Security Premium’s scores averaged out to zero.
With F-Secure’s parental control system, you define a child profile and connect the devices used by that child. You can configure the system from My F-Secure online or from the main app. You reach it by opening the People & Devices page from the main window and adding or editing a child profile. You can also assign a device to a child when you install F-Secure Internet Security.
You need access to the child’s device to enable parental control. The app itself recommends performing the configuration with your child present. Now you can control the configuration from any of your own devices and connect all your child’s accounts and devices to the same profile for central management.
You start by entering your child’s name and choosing from a selection of age groups: 0-6 years, 7-12 years; 13-16 years; 17-18 years; or Over 18 years. I’m dubious about imposing parental controls on adults over 18, but the option is there. The configuration system does advise that you work through the configuration process together with your child.
Many parents have the impression their kids spend too much time with their noses buried in a screen. F-Secure can cap device time for weekdays and separately for weekends. Do be aware that these limits just affect the active device. If little Rhaenyra runs out of time on her Mac, she can just switch to a phone or tablet. Another page lets parents define bedtime, a single period during which the device isn’t available. Here, too, parents can configure weekdays and weekends separately.
Of course, keeping kids from accidentally (or deliberately) encountering the seamy side of the internet is a primary feature of parental control systems. F-Secure’s content filter can block web pages matching 16 categories, color-coded red for inappropriate, yellow for iffy, and blue for relatively safe. The blue group includes Social networks, Anonymizers, and Unknown. Don’t neglect to block Anonymizers, as a clever teen could do an end-run around the content filter by connecting through a secure anonymizing proxy.
On the Mac, F-Secure relies on its browser extension to handle content filtering. That’s a big problem because even without administrator privileges, your child can simply remove or disable the extension. The Windows edition performs its filtering at the network level, so it works in any browser, even a tiny browser I wrote myself.
Precisely what you’ll see when you go to edit a child profile depends on just what devices the child uses. If the only device is an iPad or iPhone, only Bedtime and Content Filtering are present. Add a Mac or PC, and you add Daily Time Limits. Finally, if the child uses an Android device, App Control appears (I’ll discuss that feature below).
This parental control system is cross-platform and remotely configured, which is good. However, it doesn’t compare with the full-featured parental control systems in Bitdefender Total Security, Norton, or Kaspersky.
To install F-Secure Internet Security on a Mac, you either send an email with the installation link or log into My F-Secure online and download the installer. The Mac edition strongly resembles its Windows counterpart. The main visible difference is that the main window doesn’t display recent events. On a Mac, F-Secure Internet Security requires macOS 11 (Big Sur) or higher. For full details about the Mac edition, please read my review of F-Secure Internet Security for Mac. I’ll offer a brief summary here.
One of the two independent antivirus labs I follow for Mac antivirus results included F-Secure in its latest round of testing. F-Secure has earned high scores from AV-Test Institute in the past, but not this time around. It scored 4.5 of six possible points for protection, 5.5 of six for performance, and the full six points for usability. Its overall score of 16 points looks especially bad, given that all other products in the test earned a perfect 18 points.
Challenged to clean up a thumb drive brimming with Windows malware, it detected 78% of the samples. That score matches the current average, but more than a dozen other products did better. F-Secure’s protection against phishing sites (fraudulent sites that try to steal your login credentials) proved excellent in past tests but much less effective this time around. The macOS edition detected just 80% of the real-world phishing pages in testing. That’s better than the 70% scored under Windows, but still a poor showing. Mac editions of Avast, Trend Micro, and Webroot reached 100% protection in their own latest phishing tests.
However, if protecting macOS devices is your main goal, you can do better. Norton 360 Deluxe for Mac is a full security suite, and it comes with a VPN that’s not limited in features or bandwidth. Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac also earned perfect scores from two labs and includes ransomware protection. These two are our Editors’ Choice products for antivirus protection under macOS.
Installing F-Secure Internet Security on an Android device is as simple as sending an installation link via email or text. Once you get through installation and the usual permissions, you’ll find the Android edition is as similar as possible to the Windows and macOS versions. There’s no room for clouds and trees or happy people, but you find the same big three panels: Viruses & Threats, Safe Browsing, and People & Devices. As on the Mac, Safe Browsing pops up a notification when you enter a verified banking website. No notification? Watch out; it could be a fraud.
Tapping Viruses & Threats takes you to a page that lets you launch a scan or view scan history. The scan itself runs quite quickly. As on Windows, it uses an unusual pie-slice progress indicator that sweeps the whole rectangular scan area.
As for Safe Browsing, F-Secure doesn’t attempt to filter traffic for Chrome or other browsers. Rather, it supplies its own Safe Browser and offers to make it the default. In testing, it successfully blocked access to dangerous pages. I did note that Safe Browser appears to be Chromium-based. In testing, the Chrome-style fraud warning got ahead of F-Secure’s warning in some cases.
Speaking of testing, F-Secure’s Android edition earned a perfect score from AV-Test Institute, beating out the near-perfect score of the Windows edition from this same lab. The Android editions of AVG and Bitdefender matched F-Secure’s accomplishment and earned perfect scores from AV-Comparatives and MRG-Effitas.
That’s about it for mainstream Android features. Application Privacy Rating has likewise departed, as has the lost device Finder component. To be fair, Android’s own Find My Device system is effective.
Another whole side of this app comes into view when you install F-Secure on a child’s device. Your settings for the child’s profile affect all associated devices, so if you’ve already performed that configuration, you’re instantly controlling device time limits, bedtime, and content filtering. Note that content filtering on Android only works in the Safe Browser.
There’s also an Android-specific App Control system. For each app on the system, you can choose Time Limited, Always Allowed, or Blocked. Blocked is self-explanatory—the child simply cannot use a blocked app. Choosing Time Limited doesn’t mean you get to set per-app limits. Rather, it subjects the app to the defined bedtime and daily time limit settings. Always Allowed means your child can use the app even during bedtime and after the daily time limit has expired.
You can also specify which setting applies to newly installed apps. If you really want to enforce content filtering, you need to block all browsers except Safe Browser and also block new apps (pending parental approval).
Streamlining Android security seems to be a trend. For example, McAfee’s latest Android edition has dropped anti-theft, app privacy analysis, App Lock, and more. Norton no longer includes anti-theft, unwanted call blocking, or SIM card protection.
Installing on an iPhone or iPad is just as easy as installing on Android. When the quick install finishes, you’ll note the app looks just like the Android version, but with no Viruses & Threats panel. That makes sense. The same tight controls that make iOS nearly invulnerable to malware attack also prevent the level of access needed to run a scan for malware.
That does mean there’s just not much you can do with the iOS app. You get full control over your users and devices, just as on any platform. And you can route your web surfing through the Safe Browser if you want F-Secure to steer you away from malicious or fraudulent websites. New since my last review, a browser extension brings safe browsing to Safari. That’s about it for the parent version of the app.
If you configure the device for use by a child profile, things are a bit different. Your settings for bedtime and content filtering carry over from your other devices, but daily time limits aren’t enforced. Despite the new Safari extension, parental content filtering only works in F-Secure’s own Safe Browser, and you don’t have the Android-specific App Control to prevent the use of other browsers. Also, it turns out bedtimes affect nothing beyond the proprietary browser. That’s certainly another reason to make sure no alternate browser is available.
Some years ago, older versions of this app used to walk you through using the Restrictions feature in iOS to ban the use of other browsers. That’s still something you should do, but the installer no longer holds your hand. You may need to look up just how it’s done in the online FAQs. And while you’re doing that, you might consider just using the built-in parental controls in iOS instead.
F-Secure Internet Security is a modern, multi-device, cross-platform security suite, and its attractive user interface suggests both ease and innovation. However, its feature set lags far behind the best such suites. It does offer cross-device remotely managed parental control, though this component’s features are limited compared with some competitors.
On Windows, Bitdefender Total Security offers a vast cornucopia of features, including ransomware protection, spyware protection, system cleanup tools, and a Wi-Fi security check. It also lets you install Bitdefender’s award-winning macOS antivirus, powerful protection for Android devices, and less powerful iOS protection. It’s our Editors’ Choice winner for a feature-rich security mega-suite. With Norton 360 Deluxe, meanwhile, you get five cross-platform licenses, five no-limits VPN licenses, 50GB of hosted storage for your backups, and more, making it another Editors’ Choice pick.
When the IBM PC was new, I served as the president of the San Francisco PC User Group for three years. That’s how I met PCMag’s editorial team, who brought me on board in 1986. In the years since that fateful meeting, I’ve become PCMag’s expert on security, privacy, and identity protection, putting antivirus tools, security suites, and all kinds of security software through their paces.
Before my current security gig, I supplied PCMag readers with tips and solutions on using popular applications, operating systems, and programming languages in my “User to User” and “Ask Neil” columns, which began in 1990 and ran for almost 20 years. Along the way I …
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