V3 Secure Cloud

hnLab's antivirus and security suite products are quite popular in the company's native Korea. AhnLab is now pushing to grab some market share in the United States with the release of V3 Secure Cloud ($69.99/year for 5 licenses). Your subscription also includes five licenses to protect Android devices with V3 Mobile 2.0 (for Android). I'm not sure exactly what makes this suite popular in Korea, as the antivirus component is weak and several other components do nothing at all.

The suite installed quickly, though several infested test systems needed multiple tries to complete the mandatory initial update. I was surprised to find that the personal firewall component is disabled right out of the box. Digging into the settings, I found antiphishing, antispam, and email antivirus protection also disabled. I turned everything on; I hope every user will do the same.

Slow, Poor Malware Cleanup
Testing V3's malware cleanup took quite a while, as each scan required an hour. The average suite scans my standard clean test system in half that time. On finishing a scan, V3 lists what it found and offers to repair those threats. In several cases, it reported failure to complete the repair. An error message recommended against closing the results window without repairing all threats, but the product offered no recourse when repeated repair attempts failed.

During the scan process the real-time protection silently wiped out other threats, threats that didn't show up in the scan results list. To determine exactly what the product detected, I checked the log after each scan.

Overall, the results were dismal. V3 missed a number of samples and left behind executable traces for over half of those it did detect. Nearly half of those executable files remained running despite V3's alleged cleanup. Its 76 percent malware detection rate is the second from lowest among current products, and its overall score of 5.0 points is third from lowest. At the top we see Comodo Internet Security Pro 2012 ($4.99/year direct, 4 stars) with 97 percent detection and Norton 360 Version 6.0 ($79.99 direct for three licenses, 4.5 stars) with 7.4 points; Norton missed some threats that Comodo detected, but better cleanup earned it a higher overall score.

V3 faired especially poorly against rootkits. More than half of current products detect 100 percent of my rootkit samples; V3 only saw 86 percent. It left some rootkits running, some of them with their rootkit technology intact, earning a below-average score of 4.7 points for rootkit removal. Norton topped this test with 8.9 points.

Apparently my particular scareware samples are relatively easy to detect, as all but four suites detected them. V3 is one of those four. With 6.3 points for scareware removal, it's at the bottom of the heap. Norton aced this test, scoring a perfect 10. For an explanation of my testing methodology and scoring system, see How We Test Malware Removal.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/Jd8-ZOq3H1E/0,2817,2401819,00.asp

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