Review by KJN

The latest version of Kaspersky Internet Security offers highly rated protection, including an effective banner ad blocker, which most security suites no longer offer. To me this is a significant feature which has led me for several years to choose Kaspersky software over it’s competitors. The reason I couldn’t give it 5 stars this time is that it has become less flexible, taking some decisions out of the hands of the user. While for some users this may be preferred (fewer decisions to make), I would rather have more input into how certain situations are handled. Another weak point is the anti-spam utility, which seems to miss certain types of spam and it flags some non-spam e-mails until it has built up a whitelist of OK senders. Having recently reviewed Norton’s 360, it does a better job of spam control out of the box. Once trained, Kaspersky does a good job, but this takes time and work on the users part. So if the banner blocker is important for you as it is for me, Kaspersky is a very capable security solution, and I can live with the weakness in anti-spam. Norton’s software has better spam blocking capability, but is missing the banner ad blocker. For dealing with most malware, most technical review sites rate them pretty close in capability.