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Nightwalker

Level 24
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Honorary Member
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Content Creator
Well-known
May 26, 2014
1,339
I am giving it a trial in my spare old machine and so far so good, I am impressed with how fast it installed and how little it impacts system performance.
The interface is very simple and there is no complex settings (tweakers wont like it), but for me it is perfect.

There is some inconsistencies with web protection, but it isnt a big deal, the change from Bitdefender engine to Avira made it much better in some aspects, it is a very solid option and for free it is a no brainer, just get it if you are not committed to some other paid solution.
 

LDogg

Level 33
Verified
Top Poster
Well-known
May 4, 2018
2,261
I am giving it a trial in my spare old machine and so far so good, I am impressed with how fast it installed and how little it impacts system performance.
The interface is very simple and there is no complex settings (tweakers wont like it), but for me it is perfect.

There is some inconsistencies with web protection, but it isnt a big deal, the change from Bitdefender engine to Avira made it much better in some aspects, it is a very solid option and for free it is a no brainer, just get it if you are not committed to some other paid solution.
Could you give screenshots from Task Manager showing the impact on resources?

~LDogg
 

Nightwalker

Level 24
Verified
Honorary Member
Top Poster
Content Creator
Well-known
May 26, 2014
1,339
Could you give screenshots from Task Manager showing the impact on resources?

~LDogg

It has many processes, but they are very light in resources usage.

Capturar.JPG
 

MacDefender

Level 16
Verified
Top Poster
Oct 13, 2019
779
The downside I see in F Secure products it's clean up ability against unknown malware is Nil.
Apart from that Avira Signatures + DG does quite well.
F secure should really really improve their clean up ability.

This is a good point. You're definitely right -- F-Secure seems to only understand that an individual file or process is deemed malicious by any of their engines, and the recourse is to terminate it or delete/quarantine that file.

With that said, their engines seem tuned towards stopping an infection before it can happen -- particularly DeepGuard, it's right up there with Emsisoft in terms of being super sensitive to a not-well-known binary doing unusual things (one example is to compile something complicated like VirtualBox at your desk and try to run it... both DeepGuard and Emsi tend to freak out about that while other AV's are like yeah whatever, this unknown thing is using 10GB RAM and hooking into virtualization extensions and capturing your mouse in certain cases, big whoop)

I would not choose F-Secure if what you're trying to do is clean up an already-infected machine. I definitely would choose it to protect a known-clean machine though, especially against zero-day threats.

Norton seems to invest more in cleaning up known threats, while Kaspersky does good at cleaning up both known and unknown threats -- KSW seems like it is rather tolerant to suspicious actions but it is remembering everything the process did. Once it becomes deemed malicious, it offers to roll back everything the process did, even days ago.

I am giving it a trial in my spare old machine and so far so good, I am impressed with how fast it installed and how little it impacts system performance.
The interface is very simple and there is no complex settings (tweakers wont like it), but for me it is perfect.

There is some inconsistencies with web protection, but it isnt a big deal, the change from Bitdefender engine to Avira made it much better in some aspects, it is a very solid option and for free it is a no brainer, just get it if you are not committed to some other paid solution.

Yeah there's basically zero settings. Buried in one of the program directories, there is some sort of .ini file that looks like how you configure raw settings for their enterprise products but I'm afraid to edit it. The scanner is almost unbelievably fast -- a full hard disk scan for me takes about 20 seconds. I know everyone praises ESET for being light, but I cannot tell the difference between ESET and F-Secure running on my machine.

It's kind of funny because my first exposure with F-Secure was in the early 2000's. Back then, they used AVP (Kaspersky), F-Prot, and their own heuristics engine. That product was comically heavyweight -- it made the mouse cursor lag at times. But as you can imagine, stacking more engines on top of Kaspersky made it amazing in terms of protection. I gave up on it because it was way too heavy, and even their Internet Security product around 2015 with the application firewall was very heavy. These past few weeks I looked at it again just as a testing point but could not believe how much the product has changed. I thought F-Secure had faded away into an irrelevant brand name, but for me its performance (both in terms of resources and in terms of signatures and behavior blocking) has been right up there with the best.
 

MacDefender

Level 16
Verified
Top Poster
Oct 13, 2019
779
Full hard disk scan in about 20 seconds. Are you 100% sure that actually is a full scan?
11,200 items scanned, it's the big scan button. Of course the default settings skip file extensions that aren't likely to be infected so that's probably a piece of it, but 11,000 files scanned in 20 seconds is pretty insane either way.

(I don't have a weak machine though, it's a 6 core i7 with 64GB RAM and a high end NVMe SSD. With that said Norton takes much longer to scan the same set of files.)


EDIT: Found the "Full Computer Scan" button, that took 6 minutes to scan 250,000 files. About 4 out of the 6 minutes was spent scanning a compressed .jar inside the Ubiquiti UniFi controller setup and Javascript files within Visual Studio 2019. The script and Java scanning are slower and a different set of processes start using CPU, while the executables scanner seems really fast.
 
Last edited:

upnorth

Moderator
Verified
Staff Member
Malware Hunter
Well-known
Jul 27, 2015
5,457
11,200 items scanned, it's the big scan button. Of course the default settings skip file extensions that aren't likely to be infected so that's probably a piece of it, but 11,000 files scanned in 20 seconds is pretty insane either way.

(I don't have a weak machine though, it's a 6 core i7 with 64GB RAM and a high end NVMe SSD. With that said Norton takes much longer to scan the same set of files.)
The big scan button on the main UI ain't the full scan feature. Check here.
Tools > Virus scan options > Full computer scan.

Now with your specs that will almost for sure be very fast anyway.
 

MacDefender

Level 16
Verified
Top Poster
Oct 13, 2019
779
The big scan button on the main UI ain't the full scan feature. Check here.


Now with your specs that will almost for sure be very fast anyway.

Thank you! Yep I realized my mistake too and edited my post while you were posting this, with updated timing! That was kind of confusing with the big scan button -- that's what everyone else calls a Quick Scan.


BTW something else I found interesting:


In short:
- Hydra: Script based (heuristic) AV engine.
- Virgo: Certificate whitelisting engine.
- Capricorn: Signature based AV engine.
- Lynx: Cloud scanning (sandbox) engine.

Capricorn is Avira and the detections say '!fsocap' at the end. Today's scan had these engines listed:
  • F-Secure Capricorn: 18.0.567, 2019-11-15
  • F-Secure Hydra: 6.0.95, 2019-11-15
  • F-Secure Online: 17.5.1243
  • F-Secure USS: 6.0.23, 2019-09-03
  • F-Secure Virgo Detection: 17.5.1243

Lynx and DeepGuard show up in the settings:
1573837750701.png
 

LDogg

Level 33
Verified
Top Poster
Well-known
May 4, 2018
2,261
Installed and a hella lot lighter on resources than BD. Got my 1 year subscription too, now I may install Tinywall again.

Can't even install Tinywall at all, how strange...

~LDogg
 
Last edited:
F

ForgottenSeer 58943

I tried it. While the machine felt pretty snappy in general use - there was a clear and noticeable decline in network (LAN/WAN) throughput and also some page load drag. Not huge, but it was there, and when we're dealing with milliseconds for page loads, something that adds a few milliseconds to the display/load of a page is enough to be annoying to me. (Threadripper, 1070Ti card, 16GB DDR5, NVME Samsung Drive)

I ended up removing it. However the mobile version which works with this license seems to be significantly improved, but lacking some basic features like an app-lock.
 

MacDefender

Level 16
Verified
Top Poster
Oct 13, 2019
779
I tried it. While the machine felt pretty snappy in general use - there was a clear and noticeable decline in network (LAN/WAN) throughput and also some page load drag. Not huge, but it was there, and when we're dealing with milliseconds for page loads, something that adds a few milliseconds to the display/load of a page is enough to be annoying to me. (Threadripper, 1070Ti card, 16GB DDR5, NVME Samsung Drive)

I ended up removing it. However the mobile version which works with this license seems to be significantly improved, but lacking some basic features like an app-lock.
That’s probably the web filtering component which can be disabled. I see this problem with most of the web filtering components out there, even ESET and Norton contribute to this kind of lag.

usually I just turn off this component and let Chrome’s built in URL blacklisting system protect me from that.
 

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