A typical security suite includes antivirus, firewall, spam filtering, parental control, and some kind of privacy protection, often antiphishing. Webroot SecureAnywhere Internet Security Plus (2014) ($59.99 direct for three devices) skips spam filtering and parental control, since many users don't need these. The security components it does include are uniformly impressive, and it's the smallest suite around as far as disk space and resource usage goes.
Webroot's standalone antivirus includes an outbound firewall (relying on Windows Firewall for inbound protection) and a powerful antiphishing component. The most visible thing that the suite adds is a full-featured password manager, powered by LastPass. What you don't see immediately is you can use your three licenses to install the Webroot suite on any combination of PCs, Macs, and Android devices. A handy online console manages all your installations and lets you access your passwords from any Web-equipped PC.
Unusual Antivirus
The typical antivirus relies on a combination of signature-based detection and behavioral or heuristic detection, but Webroot isn't typical. It does include signatures for common threats in its cloud-based system, but its primary means of detecting malware involves tracking hundreds of program behaviors and traits. I put extra effort into testing, to verify that it does what it says. You really, really should read my review of Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus (2014) to fully understand the antivirus, as this review will simply summarize my findings.
Webroot installs in minutes and immediately performs a full scan; it's done with that scan before most products would have finished installing and updating. It installed in a flash on all but one of my malware-infested test systems, and a quick session with Webroot's bootable remote-control diagnostic system solved a ransomware problem on that holdout.
At the end of any scan that found malware, Webroot re-scans to make sure no traces remain. On two systems it advised contacting tech support for manual removal. The process took hours of remote control by tech support and involved threat-specific tools from Webroot and third parties, as well as one-off cleanup scripts written by the support agents.
Webroot detected 89 percent of the samples, more than any other suite tested using the same sample collection. It scores 6.6 points, sharing first place with Bitdefender Internet Security (2014) and F-Secure Internet Security 2014. For more detail on how I conduct this malware removal test, please see How We Test Malware Removal.
Webroot's handling of unknown programs just isn't compatible with most independent lab tests, though the company has announced that AV-Test is working on switching to a compatible test regimen. The chart below summarizes recent test results, but there's just not enough info from the labs to help evaluate Webroot. For a description of the third-party testing labs I follow, please read see How We Interpret Antivirus Lab Tests.
Webroot doesn't flag an unknown program as malicious until it performs a malicious action, so after my baseline malware blocking test I let it run overnight. In the morning it had detected a few more samples. To check its claimed ability to journal activity by an unknown program and roll it back upon detecting it as malicious, I repeated this test with Webroot cut off from the Internet, then reestablished an Internet connection after launching all samples. The results were comparable.
Webroot detected 91 percent of the malware samples and scored 8.8 points in this test. That's roughly in the middle of the pack, and a bit higher than the 8.5 points earned by Norton Internet Security (2014). Note that Symantec, like Webroot, isn't entirely compatible with some current tests. If you're wondering how I evaluate a product's malware blocking skills, see How We Test Malware Blocking.
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