User manual

Product Review: Mac Security ‐ July 2013 www.av-comparatives.org
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If a user without administrator privileges
attempts to disable real-time protection from
the main program window, the control is
locked and cannot be unlocked without
entering administrator credentials. However,
the same user can disable protection by
clicking the Kaspersky icon in the System Tray
and then clicking “Turn Protection Off” – this
is not locked and does not require any
additional credentials. For a suite that is
obviously intended for family use, this strikes
us as inappropriate. We have informed
Kaspersky of this, and they say they will
rectify it in the near future.
Scheduled scanning
Kaspersky Security for Mac does not provide
any means of scheduling a scan, which we
consider an omission.
AMTSO Feature Settings Checks
Results for the AMTSO Feature Settings Checks
were as follows:
EICAR.COM test file manual download: the
following dialog box is displayed:
Clicking Block prevents the file from being
downloaded.
EICAR.COM test file drive-by download: the
same dialog box as above is shown, and again
clicking Block prevents the download.
EICAR potentially unwanted application: the
program was downloaded without any sort of
action or message from Kaspersky Anti-Virus
for Mac. Kaspersky is shown among the
vendors supporting this feature, though we
assume this only applies to Windows versions.
AMTSO phishing test page: a warning
message, very similar to the one above, was
shown; clicking Block prevented the page
from being shown.
CloudCar testfile: The familiar warning dialog
was again shown, and again clicking Block
prevented the download.
Real-time protection test: As soon as we
plugged a USB flash drive containing Mac
malware samples into our test computer,
Kaspersky warned that threats had been
detected.
We found the warning messages provided by
Kaspersky Security to be perfectly clear.
However, we note that in the warning dialog
displayed when malware is detected, the
options “Block” and “Allow” are equally
prominent; we would suggest that Block
should be made the clear default option.
Malware protection/detection test
In our scan tests, Kaspersky Security
identified all the malware samples, both Mac
and Windows, used in our tests.
Help and documentation
There is a comprehensive 64-page manual for
Kaspersky Security for Mac, which can easily
be downloaded from the manufacturer’s
website. It has been produced to the same
excellent standard found in other Kaspersky
documentation. The text has been
appropriately bookmarked, making it easy to
find sections from Adobe Reader’s Bookmarks
Bar, and the contents page has been
hyperlinked to enable the reader to go
straight to the page or section concerned. The
manual has been clearly written and is
suitably illustrated with screenshots.
There is also a searchable online knowledge
base, with a range of FAQs (frequently asked
questions). Answers given are clear,
comprehensive and well illustrated with
screenshots.