F-Secure's Internet Security 2006

To obtain a 30-day trial copy of the software, go to the F-Secure Internet Security 2006 trial version download page. Fill out the form, then click Submit. When you get your e-mail reply (ours arrived in less than 10 minutes), follow the download link provided in the e-mail message.

After following the link, download the package, and save a local copy in a folder where you'll be able to find it. (The file is named fs2006f.exe). We put ours in a subfolder inside our Downloads folder and simply named it F-Secure.

Double-click the file (again, named fs2006f.exe) to invoke the installer. At first this brings up a file unpack progress bar as the program uncompresses the files necessary to begin the install process. Next, you'll see the warning screen (pictured below), which echoes our earlier advice to remove all security related components from your system before proceeding.

Click the radio button next to "I accept the terms" for the F-Secure License Terms shown. Then continue through to the next screen by clicking on Next as shown here:

Next, you have a choice: You can enter a valid license key, which is available to those who pay for this software at prices that start at $40 for a one-year license. Or you can click the radio button for the "Evaluate the service" option as shown in the screenshot below. For now, choose the latter. Then click Next to proceed to the next screen as shown here:

You'll be prompted to choose a 30-day trial of either Internet Security 2006 or Anti-Virus 2006. The default is what you want: F-Secure Internet Security 2006. Click Next to advance to the next screen, as shown below:

Now you must choose a home directory into which the application will be installed. The default is C:Program FilesF-Secure Internet Security. But you might want to use the Browse button to choose a different target. Once you've made your selection, click Next to advance to the next screen, as shown below:

The initial installation begins at this point. You'll see a variety of screens with progress bars (like the one shown below) or default security settings (which went by too fast for us to screen capture it for this Recipe). The program will eventually complete the initial installation. This took about six minutes on our test machine, a Pentium 4 570J with 2 GB of RAM and a reasonably fast Maxtor SATA drives. Your mileage may vary.

Next, a screen pops up (shown below) to indicate that installation is both complete and successful. But lest you think your work is done, this is really only the initial installation of the package. As the next sequence of screens will show, there's still quite a bit of work left for you to do!

On the initial Start-up Wizard screen, click Next. This is the part of the process where you'll select program components.

The next Start-up Wizard screen is labeled "Application Control," as shown below. This invokes the suite's Firewall component, and it is set by default to inform you whenever any new application attempts to connect to the Internet. That way, you can decide if the connection should be allowed or denied. For now, leave this default, which is Yes. Click Next to bring up the next screen.

The next Start-up Wizard screen is labeled "Web Browser" as shown below. This invokes the suite's Web browser controls for dealing with pop-ups, active content, and so forth. In most cases, the program will detect your default browser correctly. But if you have more than one browser installed, and you wish to designate another as your default Web browser, use the pull-down menu shown at the bottom left of the screenshot below to select it. Then click Next to proceed.

Now the Start-up Wizard tackles e-mail client settings. First, it will identify what it believes is your default e-mail client. Then it gives you a pull-down list from which you can make changes if you'd like. This is shown here:

The next item is parental (content) controls, which we skipped during our test. To proceed to the screen labeled "Tasks" (as shown below), click Next. This is where you tell the program what it should do after you complete your work with the Start-up Wizard. By default, all three boxes are checked by default (Perform full computer check, Enable a weekly virus scan, and Show main user interface). That's how we think you should leave things. Click next to get to the final Start-up Wizard screen.

The Finish screen (shown below) concludes your interactions with the Start-up Wizard. As soon as you click the Finish button at the lower right, your initial setup work is done.

Launch F-Secure Internet Security 2006. If it's not already open, Click Start, All Programs, F-Secure Internet Security 2006, and then click Open F-Secure Internet Security 2006. This produces the control center/home screen, as shown above.

Click on the Virus & Spy Protection button at the upper left (just beneath Home). You'll see the obvious controls that are available for use with anti-virus and anti-spyware capability, as seen here:

These options include various forms of scanning controls, each with its own set of options under the Change/Configure entry at the right-hand side of the display. Everything is enabled by default and works pretty well. You have numerous options available to handle real-time and e-mail scanning, and you can also manage when scans are scheduled: daily, weekly or monthly, on specific days of the week, and starting at a specific time. Browser and system controls may be either enabled or disabled (they're enabled by default).

Things get a little more interesting when you click the hyperlink style control at the lower right that reads "Scan my computer…" As shown in the screenshot below, this produces a pop-up menu that immediately makes available some additional controls. Options here include the ability to scan your hard drives for a target for viruses, scan your system for spyware or rootkits, or combine all general checks into a full computer check.

Because rootkit handling is so important, you can launch a rootkit scan by clicking on the "Scan System for Rootkits entry" in the pop-up menu. This produces a screen like the one shown below, as the rootkit scan goes about its task of looking for evidence of such software:

As the process grinds through to completion, the majority of users will wind up with a screen that looks like the next screenshot, which reports no evidence of rootkits being found:

For more detail about what the scan turned up, click the Show Report button, which appears at the lower left of the preceding screenshot. But F-Secure's Blacklight rootkit detector engine produces much less commentary than even the terrific Sysinternals RootKitRevealer engine does; this means there are very few false positives to worry about, making F-Secure better suited for inexperienced users. (While system pros will recognize that many of RootkitRevealer's false positives are temporary files, less-savvy users might think they've been infected when it's not the case.) Kudos to F-Secure for making this tool so end-user-friendly.

Finish by clicking the Close button. This ends this exploration of the program's anti-virus, anti-spyware, and rootkit-detection capabilities.

Launch F-Secure Internet Security 2006. Click Start, All Programs, F-Secure Internet Security 2006, and Open F-Secure Internet Security 2006. The usual home screen will appear.

Click on the Internet Shield button; it's the third from the top in the column on the left-hand side of the home screen. This produces the Internet Shield display, as shown here:

Click the Configure… link at the right hand side of the Firewall information line. This opens a new window called Firewall that has three tabs: one each for Rules, Services, and Settings. The Rules tab appears on top by default, as shown here:

To begin your exploration, create a new rule. Click the Add button at the lower left of the rules pane (as shown in the figure above). The Firewall Rule Wizard opens an Add a New Rule window, as shown below.

Here, we're going to create a rule regarding Server Message Block traffic, used for local file access within a single IP subnet. We type the string LOCAL_SMB to name this rule, then select the rule's type as Allow. Simply put, this rule permits things to happen; by contrast, a deny rule blocks things from happening. (As an option, Rules can be defined to only apply to dial-up connections, through the check-box at the bottom of this window.) Finally, to advance to the next step in the rule-making sequence, click Next.

Apply an IP address range, if applicable. In this case, we used the range of valid client addresses in our local subnet—namely, 172.16.1.1 through 172.16.1.254 (one of the private Class B addresses reserved in RFC 1918) as shown in the figure below:

When you click the Edit button on the right, this opens another window in which you can define individual IP addresses, or contiguous IP address ranges, to which the rule applies (we chose our entire local subnet). When this step is complete, click Next.

You now select the service to which the rule applies. Use the giant pull-down list of IP services and clicking the checkbox to the left of the one you want; in this case, that would be SMB over TCP/IP (TCP). Next, you can manage flow control. (The client on the left and the world on the right with a two-headed arrow means to/from all clients and the network.) By clicking on the direction column, you can select a two-headed arrow to allow or deny two-way traffic. Or you can pick one-way arrows to allow or deny flows only in one direction. The results of our two-way rule appear in the screenshot below. When you're done with this step, click Next.

Now it's time to deal with alerting. You have three choices: issue no alert (the default), log the information, and log the information and issue a pop-up message. You can also define a text message to be included in the log and, where applicable, a pop-up. This can be especially handy when dealing with situations where an attack of some kind might be underway. The next screenshot includes only the meaningless TEST_CONFIG string. When you're finished with this step, click Next to finish your rule.

Finally, the software lets you review the entire rule definition on a single screen, as shown below. If you like what you see, click Finish. If not, use the back button to return to whatever previous step(s) warrant your attention. When you're happy with your revisions, click Finish, and you're done.