By Neil J. Rubenking How often do you find an antivirus product that's still managed by its eponymous creator? Peter Norton and Symantec's Norton product line went their separate ways ages ago. John McAfee is still making news, but not in connection with McAfee the company. Then there's Eugene Kaspersky, still at the helm of Kaspersky Lab. Maybe continuity pays off; Kaspersky Anti-Virus (2015) is an impressive and highly capable antivirus program. It's affordable, too: You can purchase a single one-year subscription for $39.95, or get a three-pack for $20 more.
The product's clean main window displays current security status, with a link to dig in for details, good or bad. Four big panels let you quickly launch a scan, check for updates, view activity reports, and activate a virtual keyboard.
The virtual keyboard deserves a little extra attention. Many products offer a similar feature, to let you enter passwords without using the vulnerable physical keyboard. Kaspersky's floating semi-transparent keyboard isn't just better-looking than the competition. It also includes technology that keeps spyware from capturing your personal data by scraping the screen.
Simple Settings
You can install Kaspersky and use it out of the box without ever changing any settings. By default, it automatically chooses the best action when detecting malware; it doesn't make you decide. This is similar to the default Autopilot mode in Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2015.
From the Settings screen, you can toggle security components on and off, or dig in for more detail. The one item you might want to examine is System Watcher. This feature tracks system activity and, when possible, completely rolls back activity by detected malware. You'll also find the special key combination to break away from screen-locking malware—Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F4 by default.
Kaspersky works hard to avoid impacting system performance. On the settings tab for performance, you can see that by default it postpones any scheduled scans that would occur while you're on battery power. It will refrain from interrupting when you're playing a full-screen game, and it defaults to limiting resources used during startup, so your boot time isn't slowed. You don't need to change these settings, but it's good to know what's going on in the background.
Loved by the Labs
All the antivirus testing labs that I follow include Kaspersky's products in their testing, and Kaspersky earns universally high marks. ICSA Labs and West Coast Labs certify Kaspersky for malware detection and cleaning; West Coast Labs adds "Platinum Checkmark" certification. Kaspersky participated in all 12 of the most recent tests by Virus Bulletin and earned VB100 certification in 10 of them.
Kaspersky Anti-Virus (2015) Lab Tests Chart
AV-Test Institute rates products in three categories: protection, performance, and usability. Kaspersky earned six of six possible points in all three, a rare perfect store. In all of the static and dynamic tests by AV-Comparatives, Kaspersky rated Advanced+, the highest possible rating. Dennis Technology Labs certified Kaspersky at the AAA level, again the highest possible level.
Few security vendors reach such stratospheric levels with the independent labs. Bitdefender is one of the few that comes close.
See How We Interpret Antivirus Lab Tests.
Hands-On Malware Blocking
Those independent labs can devote far more resources to testing than I can, but I still like to do some hands-on testing, exposing each antivirus product to a collection of various malware samples. Kaspersky and Bitdefender are the first products I've tested since converting all of my virtual machines to Windows 8.1 and swapping in a new collection of samples.
As soon as I opened the folder containing my samples, Kaspersky got to work, quickly wiping out 69 percent of them. I proceeded to launch those that survived this massacre, noting just how Kaspersky handled them. In all, it detected 83 percent of the samples. Its overall score of 7.9 points reflects the fact that a few of the samples managed to place executable files on the test system despite being detected by the antivirus.
Kaspersky Anti-Virus (2015) Malware Blocking Chart
Bitdefender did a little better than Kaspersky, with 86 percent detection and an overall score of 8.4. You can see that some products tested with my previous collection managed higher scores. However, there's a possibility that those tested most recently gained an advantage due to the increasing age of the older samples. And when the independent labs put a product at the top, I give less weight to my own hands-on tests.
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