Outpost Security Suite Pro 7.5

very good
key review info
application features
  • Firewall
  • (5 more, see all...)

Agnitum is better known for its firewall rather than anti-malware protection. With the recent release of a new product line, our focus shifted towards Outpost Security Suite Pro, the protection bundle which encompasses all the layers of protection developed by the company.

The price of this hefty suite is regularly set at $49.95, but the company is currently offering it for as low as $29.95 for one year of protection and updates.

Getting it on the system is not difficult task, but it does take some time for everything to fall in place restarting the machine is imminent at the end. During the process you will be asked to choose one of the two working modes available (simple and expert). This selection does not affect the installation process but the behavior of the product when it comes to the options for taking an action and the richness of the menus in the interface.

During the installation procedure you can instruct the app to deliver a set of extra components, such as Anti-Malware protection, Web Control, and Anti-Spam module. These are pretty important protection layers that keep you safe from malware, unsolicited email and malicious elements embedded in web pages.

Compared to other security bundles, Outpost Security Suite Pro offers a small list of modules, but nothing is unrelated to security. The package includes a firewall, real-time protection that keeps monitoring program activity and blocks and reports malicious activity, web content filtering and anti-spam possibility.

All these are wrapped up in an out-of-trend interface, more appropriate for experienced users since there is plenty of granular control and there are options galore. An overall of the state of each component as well as the aggressiveness level can be viewed in the main application window, called “My Security”.

Firewall

The firewall module seems pretty simple at a first glance, but its intricacy is revealed once you attempt some fine tuning. If you start editing the rules of an application you’ll find a myriad of options to control the channels a program uses to exchange information as well as inter-process communication, which is sometimes used by malware to send info to the network on behalf of legitimate applications.

Pop-ups and alerts make for the greatest issue when it comes to firewalls. In order to reduce them, the firewall runs in auto-learn mode at the beginning, which means that activity of trusted apps is viewed as legitimate and, as such, allowed.

This reduces the amount of pop-ups the component would generate, but does not eliminate them. During our testing we still had to offer our assistance and instruct the firewall to block or allow the connection it detected, even in the case of known programs such as PicPick or Pidgin. However, we have to admit that as you take care of notifications their number decreases significantly up to the point that only new or unknown connections are reported. You can terminate auto-learn mode at any time, from the context menu of the system tray icon.

The submenus in the firewall section give you access to network activity and the ports used to communicate outside the system. Network activity is extremely rich in details and shows the remote addresses various processes connect to, the ports used for this, the rules governing their activity as well as the amount of data transferred in and out the computer.

As far as the efficiency is concerned, we used more than 30 tools to try to outsmart the firewall and recorded vulnerabilities only in three cases. We managed to send details over the web using Windows DNS APIs, impersonate the default browser in memory and connect to the Internet as well as modify the contents on the disk directly.

But despite these flaws the program succeeded to protect our test system against various injection attempts, modification of the registry or the physical memory and hijacking efforts. It proved that it deserves its recommendations as one of the best firewalls currently available on the market.

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Proactive Protection

This is the core module in the bundle responsible for constantly monitoring everything that moves on the system. It encompasses behavioral analysis of the running processes in order to pick up malicious activity, keeps an eye on vulnerable system objects so that they’re not changed by unauthorized apps and it can also prevent user-defined folders from being accessed.

Under Proactive Protection you will find a process manager and a file and registry activity monitor. Both are available in the expert view of the interface. Their purpose is to present you the items running on your system.

The process manager offers extensive details on a selected item since it is designed to display child processes and the modules registered with them. For the latter you get a description as well as the manufacturer, thus making it easy for an expert user to spot modules that have injected into a legitimate process. Furthermore, all processes and modules can be sent to quarantine if deemed suspicious.

You can check out every operation a process makes on the disk (read, write, create, delete) by simply adding it to the File and Registry Activity monitor. This section will log every step complete with the type of action, date and time as well as location of the modification.

On the surface there isn’t much to configure in this module, but if you dive into the configuration panel you’ll find that all Proactive Protection components can be tweaked. There are various default levels of security for behavioral analysis and you can also customize the activities that should trigger an alert on your screen as well as create a list of components that are safe to be accessed by new apps.

Even if the suite monitors and protects vulnerable system objects, you can enrich the list with items of your own as well as customize the actions for each object when they’re accessed. Our recommendation is to keep this area untouched unless you know what you’re doing.

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Anti-Malware

This module comes with its own real-time protection in order to prevent known malware from infecting files. The main window of this section presents statistics about the malware database used, identifiable by date, the number of objects scanned and the last verified file.

The suite brings in the traditional scan types (quick, full and custom) but also throws in the possibility to create custom profiles for the job, which you can use according to the areas that need to be checked.

Regardless of the choice you make the task is completed fast and with a low footprint on system resources. In our case it required about 50% of the test machine’s CPU and around 48MB of RAM.

As far as detection rate is concerned, Outpost Security Pro we put it against a 370 malware database, most of them used for testing Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware (http://www.softpedia.com/reviews/windows/Malwarebytes-039-Anti-Malware-Review-210584.shtml). The scan concluded with 29 samples left undetected, recording a detection rate of 92%. We also noted that not all detected items were properly removed.

If you find that the anti-malware engine mistook a legitimate file for a threat, you can restore it from the Quarantine section. Additionally, you can add it as an exclusion from further scans.

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Web Control

As it is a full system security solution, Outpost Security Suite Pro can also process web content and filters out certain elements in the web pages, such as ActiveX, Flash or JavaScript. Besides the security risk these may pose, not loading them can also lead to faster, cleaner browsing, since these elements are also used for displaying ads.

No matter your reasons, if you decide to tweak this functionality, be prepared for plenty of customization options. Apart from simply setting a specific Web Control level, the choices include defining the actions for different categories of web content for regular web pages and email and news.

Furthermore, if you’re looking for clean pages, with no advertisements, Outpost proposes blocking the promotions by keywords and by size of their graphics. A third option in this sense is to rely on ImproveNet list, a collection of keyword provided by ImproveNet service.

The component works like a charm when it comes to blocking websites, and it does a good job preventing the leak of private data. Under ID Block section of the configuration panel there is the possibility to punch in text strings you wish to be protected and which are not to leave your computer.

Outpost Security Pro can either replace all the private information you assign with asterisks; or it can simply block the transfer of network packets containing the personal data. There is, however, one possibility to send this sort of info off: by setting up an exclusion list with addresses that are safe to receive such details.

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Anti-Spam

Emails are also checked by the suite, both for malicious code as well as for spam. The component can be used in tandem with Microsoft email client (Outlook and Outlook Express, Windows Mail) and The Bat! and it is based on the famous Bayesian filter. This means that it’ll prove its efficiency after a while, which involves some training.

There is little customization to be done in the settings window of the application, but you can set the probability value for a message to be marked as spam or probable spam. All the analysis is carried out by the Agnitum Anti-Spam plugin dispatched to your email client.

It offers the possibility to start a training session, filter out good messages or mark the subject of a message as “spam” or “probable spam”. Although there is the option of automatic training, Agnitum also gives the opportunity of segregating the messages yourself, by manually marking them as spam or valid. The downside with the Bayesian filter, despite its eventual efficiency, is that you have to spend time training it.

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The Good

Security-wise, there is nothing in the suite you cannot use. You have a top of the line firewall, the proactive protection does a great job kicking out active threats and the anti-malware section manages to pin down malicious items, keeping them out of the system.

There are two working modes, allowing both seasoned and less experienced computer users handle the suite in a more comfortable manner.

The Bad

You will receive plenty of alerts at the beginning, even for legitimate applications. Also, we noticed a slight slowdown of the procedure when running batch operations.

The moment you start configuring the components you realize the intricacy of the suite. Few are the settings that can be handled by a less skilled category of users.

It is a daunting panel, filled with fine tuning options which do not appeal to most of the users. Customizing the firewall or proactive protection component is definitely a whole lot more than what the average user expects.

The Truth

With looks and handling defying the current design standards for security products, it is safe to say that Outpost Security Pro is an old-school product aimed at the more knowledgeable of the users rather than novices. All in all, the protection offered by Agnitum Outpost Security Pro is one of the best we’ve seen, but setting it right is reserved for more advanced users.

user interface 5
features 4
ease of use 3
pricing / value 5


final rating 4
Editor's review
very good
 
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