Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus review
Fast and effective cloud-based antivirus protection
Review date: 14 October, 2011. Review by: Kelvyn Taylor
Many antivirus products include some cloud-based elements, but most simply use the cloud as an extra tool in their armoury, gathering information from their user base, or to allow rapid responses to new threats.
Webroot’s SecureAnywhere takes the next logical step, dispensing with traditional local signature-based protection altogether to give a fully cloud-based solution (when the PC is offline, heuristic detection is used). It also adds a degree of remote web-based management for protected PCs, a feature more usually associated with business products.
We reviewed the cheapest version that offers just antivirus protection - there are also Essentials (£39.95 for 3 PCs) and Complete (£59.95 for 3 PCs) versions, which add identity protection and support for mobile devices, respectively.
Clean and speedy
It was certainly a refreshing experience installing SecureAnywhere; a tiny executable (585KB) requested the product key, then immediately ran a full scan that took only about two minutes before launching the program (subsequent scans took about 40 seconds to scan 35,000 files). And that was it - no fuss, no bother.
Webroot claims that SecureAnywhere is the lightest antivirus client around, and we’re inclined to believe them. Even the two running processes only used around 3-5MB of memory during normal operation, ramping up to a maximum of about 45MB during a system scan.
The main program interface is very clean and simple - just the state of the main components is shown. Clicking the PC Security tab lets you edit and schedule scan settings, turn the four shields (Realtime, Behaviour, Core System and Web Threat) on or off, and manage quarantined files.
Additionally, you can fine-tune the sensitivity of the program’s heuristic detection if you wish - because there's no local signature database, this is how the program monitors for suspicious file and process activity. You can dig down into advanced program settings, but we found the defaults to be fine - we did disable the annoying Captcha for authorising changes to settings, though.
Company: Webroot
Website: http://www.webroot.com/
