Avira Internet Security Suite 15.1.1609 [2023]

I’ll discuss Web protection and Ransomware protection below. Mail protection sounds like spam filtering, but it isn’t. Rather, it scans incoming POP3 and IMAP email for malware. You can optionally set it to scan outgoing SMTP messages, though I can’t picture how a malicious file could escape the real-time antivirus and then get caught by Mail protection. Given that an incoming malicious attachment would get scanned by the real-time antivirus before it could launch, I don’t see this feature adding any value.In the past, Avira made two free products available, a free antivirus and a free security suite. With the current product line, the company has officially dropped the free antivirus, though it hasn’t been wiped from the website. Avira Free Security is a stripped-down version of the top-tier Avira Prime. It includes antivirus protection, naturally, but also integrates a password manager, a feature-limited VPN, and dozens of handy utilities. Many of these features overlap what you get in the Pro antivirus. I’ll summarize my findings about those shared features here—you can read my review of the free suite for full details.

All four of the independent testing labs I follow include Avira in their latest reports, and its scores range from just OK to perfect. Each lab has its own scoring system, so I’ve devised a custom algorithm to map all scores to a 10-point scale and derive an aggregate score. Using my system, Avira scores 9.0, quite a drop from the 9.8 it had when last reviewed. Kaspersky Anti-Virus owns the top score at present, 9.9 points.

For a different view of protection, I challenge each product with 100 recent malware-hosting URLs, noting whether it keeps the browser from accessing the URL, eliminates the malware payload during download, or totally whiffs detection. Avira’s Browser Safety component, which installs in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera (but not Internet Explorer), shows 78% detection, just about evenly split between blocking access to the URL and eliminating the malware payload. Only a few products have scored lower in this test.

At the successful end of the spectrum, McAfee AntiVirus Plus manages 100% protection in its latest test. Bitdefender, G Data, and Sophos come very close, with 99%.

Browser Safety also serves to fend off phishing sites, fraudulent sites that attempt to steal your passwords. Avira earns a decent score in this test, at 91% detection, and Avira Free Antivirus for Mac scored precisely the same. Quite a few products earn even better scores, though, with the 100% scored by F-Secure and McAfee topping the list.

I’ve mentioned that the Protection options features are all enabled, where the free edition had just Real-time protection. That’s the only difference among items on the Security page. Scan choices, Quarantine, and Windows Firewall control are the same. And if you try to apply the security updates found by the Software updater, you’ll find that doing so still requires that you upgrade to Avira Prime.

Items on the Privacy page are likewise unchanged between the Pro edition and Avira Free Security. Browser Safety, Passwords, File shredder, and Privacy settings are just the same. The VPN has its free-mode restrictions in place. Paying for Pro gets you no benefits here.

As I noted in my review of the free edition, three of the five features on Avira’s Performance page simply open the corresponding item in Avira System Speedup. This separate utility is positively bursting with settings and components that require an upgrade, either to System Speedup Pro or to Avira Prime. The Optimizer component looks for ways to speed up your PC but won’t fully apply them unless you pay.

That leaves Driver updater. This tool works much like the software updater, but it seeks drivers that can be updated to improve performance. Wonder of wonders, the Update all button actually works! This is something you don’t get in the free edition. On the negative side, the update process replaced a video driver for my virtual machine test system which resulted in shrinking the display—I didn’t ask for that.

Web Protection Not Effective

As you can see, you don’t get a lot of added features by paying for the Pro antivirus. One of the few bonuses you do get with the upgrade is Web Protection. Where the Browser Safety extension only works in supported browsers, Web Protection acts at the network level, aiming to keep all web-connected programs from hooking up with dangerous URLs. Unfortunately, this feature is simply terrible.

Knowing I’d need to compare Web Protection with Browser Safety, I ran my malicious URL blocking test on the two simultaneously. In one virtual machine, I ran the test on Chrome with Browser Safety installed; in another, I used Internet Explorer with no browser extension, just Web Protection.

Browser Safety doesn’t do an outstanding job, blocking 78% of the malware downloads. But Web Protection fares even worse, scoring 67%. As noted earlier, Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, G Data, McAfee, and Sophos all score 99% or better in their latest tests.As for phishing protection, Web Protection’s score is beyond dismal. Out of many dozens of verified phishing URLs, Web Protection detected exactly one.Every time I review this product, I comment that I don’t understand why Avira doesn’t take the clearly superior detection technology in Browser Safety and apply it to Web Protection. As it is, if you use a browser other than Chrome, Edge, Opera, or Firefox, you get no protection in the free edition and painfully limited protection in Pro.

Ransomware Protection

You might get the impression from Avira’s website that even the free edition offers ransomware protection. Digging deeper, you’ll find that ransomware protection in the free edition simply means that it detects ransomware (like other malware) by matching files with known signatures. Ransomware protection at the Pro level is the real thing, using behavioral detection that triggers on activities common to ransomware “such as disabling security controls or encrypting files stored on the device.”

To test this component, I turned off real-time protection, verified that ransomware protection remained enabled, and launched a dozen real-world ransomware samples, one at a time, in a virtual machine cut off from the internet. The results were abysmal. The file encrypting samples encrypted files and demanded ransom, and the one whole-disk encryptor ran unhindered, turning my virtual machine into a virtual brick. After this dismal performance against real ransomware, I didn’t bother testing with the simulated attacks generated by the RanSim ransomware simulator from KnowBe4.