Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2015

Bitdefender Antivirus Plus is always a contender for top antivirus product due to a solid detection engine, clean interface and low system footprint. Since these are some of the most important components of any antivirus solution, it should come as no surprise that Bitdefender has once again released a high-quality product that offers more additional features than many of the other products in this middle-of-the-road category.

One of the most interesting things about this year’s release is that the improved user interface is exactly the same as the one available in Bitdefender’s premium security suite (although some features are grayed out and disabled). And, unlike many other antivirus products, Bitdefender defaults to an Autopilot mode which takes care of most security issues in the background without the need for user input. This makes Bitdefender one of the easiest solutions to use and the additional features offered by the ‘Plus’ are equivalent to the full security suites offered by some of the competition.

Overview:

Perhaps Bitdefender’s greatest claim this year is the outstanding lab results it received via multiple independent testing facilities. In fact, in all 12 of the latest tests performed by Virus Bulletin, Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2015 received VB100 certification. This release also received a near perfect score of 17.5 points from the AV-Test Institute in terms of protection, performance and usability.

Like previous versions of Bitdefender, this release consumes significantly less system resources than comparable antivirus software without sacrificing efficiency or its ability to protect the system from an assortment of threats.

In addition to the Autopilot feature making anti-malware protection hands-free in most circumstances, Bitdefender includes a vulnerability scanner that locates missing security applications for Windows and prominent applications. This feature also notifies users of improperly configured security settings within the OS.

New features:

This year introduces many new and powerful features to this already robust antivirus solution. One of these is known as SafePay – a feature designed to safeguard users from online credit card theft by automatically filling in credit cards details within billing fields on the Web to prevent unauthorized capturing of this data by keylogging programs. SafePay operates within its own browser window and as soon as the session is complete, all traces of the session are removed. This feature also includes a virtual keyboard and operates as an isolated desktop session. This means that even if malware were to sneak past Bitdefender, the SafePay session remains secure.

Active Virus Control has been improved this year to provide better dynamic detection on potential threats. By relying on a proactive detection engine, Bitdefender is capable of monitoring processes in real time and automatically flagging potentially suspicious activities – without requiring any input from the user thanks to Autopilot technology.

SafeGo is a social media protection feature added this year that scans incoming links from Facebook friends in search of potential phishing scams. This feature also monitors social media privacy settings across multiple platforms for an optimal (and safe) experience all the time.

Bitdefender has even included a free credit monitoring service with purchase of an Antivirus Plus 2015 license. Signing up for this service provides users with real time updates about anything related to credit history.

Performance:

Although certainly not the highest in the industry, Bitdefender was able to detect an impressive 86% percent of all malware introduced to the system during our testing. This coincides with similar testing performed by independent labs around the world.

Detecting most malware threats isn’t a problem for Bitdefender, but what about blocking phishing threats? Believe it or not, Bitdefender is the absolute best at detecting phishing sites based on site content. In fact, this software boasts an antiphishing detection rate of 95% - the best in the industry this year. Whether navigating to a site previously verified as a fraudulent site or one that has not yet been discovered, Bitdefender stopped almost every malicious URL from loading.

Despite impressive detection rates, Bitdefender often had trouble stopping malicious payloads from automatically downloading to the machine. That said, the anti-malware component of this program was almost always able to execution of the malicious program within the system.

Another component of Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2015 is how little the program uses in terms of system resources. Unlike many popular antivirus products, the Bitdefender engine doesn’t slow down the PC while in operation. This is due, in part, to Bitdefender Photon technology which was explicitly designed to improve speed and performance by adapting its algorithm to each PC.

Conclusion:

With a host of tools and features not commonly found in comparable products (most require upgrading to the full security suite to access them), Bitdefender is an excellent value. Combined with an accurate malware detection engine that doesn’t consume excessive system resources and the best antiphishing protection in the industry, there are few PC users who could find fault with Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2015.

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