CA Internet Security Suite - This Is A "Suite" Deal

Many security packages aimed at the home user are moving towards integration and ease of use. The advantages of this approach are that users can manage all their security applications through a single interface. Most of the time, the applications are aware of each other and work together. Still, integration is only interesting if the scanning software works and doesn't slow things down.

CA (formerly Computer Associates) has been in the security business for some time. It offers software packages that secure large enterprise-class installations and very complex network models. Internet Security Suite is a security package aimed at the home user. Instead of integration, CA has chosen to create a suite by bundling individual applications.  This makes for a less unified experience but provides more flexibility on what you actually put on your hard disk. It allows you to avoid installing software you don't need or won't use. This author takes no sides on which approach is better. I see the advantages and disadvantages of both. What matters most to me is whether the software works and how well it does what it's supposed to.

I had no issues with installing or uninstalling the suite. Once installed, each application in the suite performed to my expectations. The individual applications in general are simple, but they function well, with a clear, clean interface (the only exception being the Parental Controls application, which I'll discuss further in the User Interface section below). These applications are not for the power user or for users who need to do a lot of tweaking. But the general user will find the interface and features simple and functional.

The best part about the suite is its performance. The runtime scanners performed very well and didn't bog my system down while running in the background. Compared to other suites I've tested, this package comes out on top as far as performance goes. The full system scans did bog things down but they can and should be scheduled for off-peak hours anyway. The scanners and runtime software did take up quite a bit of system memory so if you can't spare much RAM, take note.

Installation was smooth and seamless. The product uses a standard wizard-based installer that appears to wrap different products into a unified package. The installer provides an easy-to-understand menu for choosing which products to install although I wasn't clear about the functionality of a couple of the items. The Desktop DNA Migrator is one such item. The installer does provide you with a help link to learn about each of the products before you install.
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The installer also allows you to set up some basic firewall features.
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The installer offers to install the Yahoo! Toolbar and make Yahoo! the default search engine. As is typical for these types of offerings, the installer chooses both of these options. You have to manually undo them. You may not want to blindly click "next" when working through CA Internet Security installation wizard.
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The installer wrote roughly 217Mb to the hard disk and created about 4,300 registry keys. The installer does require a reboot. The uninstaller took roughly ten minutes to remove the product. It was unclear why. The uninstaller left about 9 Mb on the disk and most of the registry keys.

Each application in the suite has a very similar look and feel. The UI is definitely geared for the casual home user and is friendly and clear but a bit cartoony. The colors used for the UI design have nice contrast and the text is easy to read throughout. The applications use a button and tab interface. There is a common toolbar across the top.

I did notice a bit of sluggishness in the UI at times particularly when scans were being done in the background. I don't think this is something to be all that concerned about since security software shouldn't be something you're in daily for long periods (if you are, it's time to find new software).

As I mentioned in another section, the application called "Security Center" is just a wrapper for the individual applications. It functions as it should but doesn't really offer any true integration. The tray icon is functional allowing you to launch each individual application, update the software, and launch the Security Center.  Thankfully, you can snooze the Anti-Virus runtime scanner for zero to 999 minutes. Unfortunately, you cannot snooze the other scanners from the taskbar.
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The CA Internet Security Suite is feature-rich. You get quite a bit for the money. Each product in the suite can be evaluated as a separate product and that is how I'll treat them in this review. The package is brought together through wrappers that allow you to access the various products through a single UI. In essence, the wrapper application simply launches each individual product. Each product can also be accessed from the system tray icon.
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ANTI-VIRUS
The Anti-Virus application is fairly modest but appears to have the basic features that a general computer user would need. The product includes a scanner, reporting, quarantine management, and some configurable options such as scan scheduling. The product also features integration with some online services that report the latest threats. The Anti-Virus application did slow my system down when running scanning in the background. (This is not the same as the realtime scanner, this is a full system scan.) I recommend scheduled scans for off-peak hours.
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The virus scanner detected the virus in the Eicar test file. It even detected that I had previously visited Eicar.com and found remnants of the virus signature in my browser's cache.

ANTI-SPYWARE
This application is modest but adequate also. It is structured exactly like Anti-Virus and features a scanner. It does some reporting (including threat reports), quarantine management and scheduling. There's not much here for the power user. However, Anti-Spyware should be adequate for the general user who needs basic protection without a lot of complex options, .
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The package also includes a phishing filter that integrates into the browser's toolbar (I tested only with Internet Explorer). The filter provides a risk assessment of every site you visit, will warn you when a site is risky, and provides a mechanism for reporting malicious sites to CA.

PERSONAL FIREWALL
The Personal Firewall as well as Anti-Virus integrate nicely with Windows Security Center (tested on Windows XP).
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The firewall like the other applications is modest but robust. Personal Firewall uses an approach similar to ZoneAlarm (reviewed on BrightHub) by treating various networks as zones. When I first installed the application, I was asked to either permit or allow the zone. Once permitted, basic network operations were allowed.
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The firewall was a bit too restrictive on first launch and I had to approve the operation of some basic applications like ActiveSync. When ActiveSync couldn't connect due to the firewall restriction, it launched a troubleshooter which tried to access the internet for information and that was blocked also. After approving both, ActiveSync was able to load with no problems.
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The help system is solid. CA includes user tips on the main interface for all the applications in addition to product help.

After the product was installed, I was no longer able to connect to the computer using Remote Desktop Connection. This was expected because I have the RDC service set to listen on a non-standard port. In order to use RDC, I had to open the port in the firewall. This was relatively easy to do but knowledge of networking and ports comes in handy. CA rightly put the feature under the "Expert Rules" tab. The engineers also opted for a single-page interface rather than a wizard which I prefer. In creating the rule, the option box provides some standard ports that users might want to open or you can specify particular ports. The screen had two oddities.

First, in order to specify my own port to open, I had to select "Specify Directly" from the dropdown box that included standard applications and ports. I almost missed this. Without choosing this option, the custom boxes are disabled. Second, after I chose an option and entered a rule name, I still had to check the "Enable Rule" box. Again, I almost missed this and if I had, RDC wouldn't have worked. (Thankfully the UI designers put the checkbox below the rule name field.)  I expect that that the "Enable Rule" box would automatically be checked for me although perhaps not checking the box is a security precaution.
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The firewall also includes a privacy manager. This allows users to set cookie management, ad and popup management, and client code (CA calls this "mobile code") management. From this interface you also can clear your browser's cache and manage how your personal identity information (PII) is handled. When the cache was being cleaned, Internet Explorer was very sluggish but the cleaner did remove files in the cache.

The email protection feature allows users to specify checking incoming mail, outgoing mail, both, or neither. It also can be set up to automatically quarantine mail attachments. It defaults to a specific list of file types and users can add their own and delete CA's defaults.
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PARENTAL CONTROLS
The suite includes a parental controls application that allows users to restrict browsing activities for the machine on which the application is installed. The password-protected application automatically pulls in all users registered on the machine and allows the administrator to set up browsing restrictions for each user. It also includes a reporting mechanism that allows the administrator to see what web-related activities and locations each user has logged.
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DNA MIGRATOR
This product allows users to transfer files and settings to another computer or to a storage medium. The product seemed to be merely a value-add and seems to function very much like the file and settings transfer wizard that comes with Windows XP. It does allow for real-time transfer or deferred transfer. When I tried the real-time transfer option, I was told that the transfer wouldn't work with the firewall on.

The spyware scanner started automatically and ran in the background while I was doing other work. It performed well. I noticed a slowdown when the scanner first started but the scan didn't negatively effect my work after it was underway.

I ran some non-scientific tests to evaluate whether the scanning software would cause some obvious and immediate problems with basic tasks like browsing the web and copying files. I wrote a small software program that would precisely time these operations. I ran a first set of tests without the software installed and running. The second set with Anti-Virus, the firewall, and Anti-Spyware running in the background with all scanners turned on. For the first test, I copied five 21MB files over my home network from the local machine (on which eTrust would be installed) to a network share. The second test copied 300 8K files over the network. I was testing to see if smaller files, and more of them, would affect the scanners negatively. Finally, my program went to five major websites (with complex layouts) and downloaded their home pages. I ran each test five times on a 2.2Ghz Celeron, 1Gb RAM, Windows XP SP2 with all the latest service packs. Here are the results:

No Scanners
1. Large Files: 17782 ms.
2. Small Files: 6334 ms.
3. Web sites: 5887 ms.

Scanners
1. Large Files: 17456 ms.
2. Small Files: 8662 ms.
3. Web sites: 5191 ms.

In these tests, the scanners performed very well. With both the anti-virus and anti-spam scanners plus the firewall on, the performance hit was almost negligible. The only area negatively effected was in copying the smaller files. This is to be expected given that the scanners have to touch each file as it passes over the network. The performance may be due to the fact that the firewall sets up secure "zones" so that files passing through those zones are trusted. Overall, the runtime scanners performed well in my modest testing.

• Tighter integration between the applications in the suite.
• Better online integration.
• Stronger firewall intelligence.
• Include the ability to pause all scanners from the system tray.