BitDefender 9 Professional Plus Review

BitDefender 9 Professional Plus is three in one PC security solution. What you get is an antivirus solution, anti-spam module and a firewall. My guess is that software developers decided that offering these three together for a moderate price would attract customers.

BitDefender Antivirus

I am not sure I like that bundling policy. On one hand, all three modules provide adequate protection. BitDefender antivirus module provides active protection against viruses and Trojans. You can scan for viruses, but the program will automatically alert you if a virus-infected message has landed in your mailbox or if some nasty is trying to change your registry. In fact even if a legitimate program tries to alter registry, you'll have to approve that first.

BitDefender antivirus works like all other antiviruses, but what I noticed is that there were no false positives. I don't think there is a single antivirus out there that did not give me a false positive at one point or another. The scanning speed is about average, so if your hard-drive is big, you'll have to wait for 40 minutes for the scan to be complete. On the other hand you can opt to scan only certain files or folders and it will take seconds.

BitDefender Antispam

This module launches automatically when the email client starts. You have the option to change sensitivity settings from low to aggressive, but if you want to stop all spam, while making sure that no good messages are lost, you'll have to train BitDefender. You'll be offered to enter a list of trusted e-mail addresses, which is pretty much a standard feature. What's good is that you can select your Inbox (just make sure that no spam messages are stored there), and BitDefender 9 Professional Plus will analyze it.

The senders of the messages that are already in your inbox will always get through. If you have a spam folder, you can select it, and BitDefender will analyze it, so you'll never get spam, at least until spammers come up with some other clever trick that the program has never encountered before.

I don't know how BitDefender antispam module works, but guessing from the fact that it kills all spam, there must be some sort of language analysis algorithm employed. I've never got image spam either, and this is probably due to the fact that these are sent from the same IP which is easy to track. I've also stopped all Korean spam, because I don't have any friend in Korea, and BitDefender lets you pick "spam languages".

BitDefender Firewall

BitDefender firewall is set up the way most firewalls are set up. Essentially, once a program tries to use the Internet, you'll be asked whether to permit it or not. Here is what I like about BitDefender Firewall – you can set different rules for the same application for up traffic and down traffic. For example, you can allow a game to send out your highscore, but you don't allow remote game server to send any data to your PC. I am not an Internet security professional, but I don't know other firewalls that let you do that, at least as easily as BitDefender does. Another handy feature is an option to give a list of permitted phone numbers.

All anti-viruses and firewalls have protection against dialers. However, some of use dial-up connection for making phone calls. Bit Defender 9 Professional Plus won't harass you when you try to do this, provided you configured it properly - added the app and the number to the white list. Even if you don't configure the program, you'll get a window that says "program X is trying to dial XXX-XXXX". Click "Yes", check the checkbox and that number will be whitelisted.