I'm almost ashamed to admit, I haven't actually used Kaspersky for extended periods of time since 10 years ago... I have spun up trials in VMs to test certain things, but never actually used the suite. Now that I am using it, there's a lot of things I'm really impressed about:
A few downsides I've noticed:
Overall I'm conflicted. I like the lightness of F-Secure SAFE but from what I've seen, Kaspersky's protection seems undoubtedly better and more comprehensive. I think if I did as much high risk stuff as I did back 10 years ago, I would choose Kaspersky in a heartbeat. But for me, my laptop is the machine I use the most, and I am having trouble deciding if it's worth losing an hour of battery life.
- The signature scanner is pretty impressive. Sure almost everyone has a fairly decent executable scanner, but Kaspersky can statically scan batch files that use CertUtil.exe or .js files that contain snippets found in ransomware, and give generic detections for those. It also identifies one of my homebrew BB test cases (the one that copies itself to Roaming and registers that copy as a startup item) as a generic trojan at scan time.
- KSW is really nice too as a behavior blocker. I like that it's configurable -- reminds me of screenshots of the older Emsisoft versions. The ability to assign applications into a trust level that imposes different restrictions is great. I expect this might be a safer way to run some less-than-trusted processes as an extra layer of security. I've already previously mentioned that KSW did well in my homebrew malware testing
- I like all of their built-in tools -- the network monitor and the process monitor are both really neat tools.
- Their signatures are really accurate against the piracy tools I've tested it against. It did exceptionally well at identifying "randomly generated" fake cracks/keygens (many sites these days randomly generate an EXE for you to evade static detection)
- I love their UI. I like that the majority of alerts conform to the standard Windows 10 notification system, except for the ones like for KSW and Advanced Disinfection which require user input. Their UI looks great on a HiDPI 4K laptop too, unlike ESET and Norton who both struggle to draw correctly proportioned alerts on HiDPI screens.
A few downsides I've noticed:
- SSL inspection is by default. People either love or hate this -- I'm personally in the latter camp. I like being able to have my browser be the agent I trust the most to verify SSL/TLS certificates and I like that sensitive websites terminate at the browser, not at a background system process and then get re-encrypted in flight. Luckily it's relatively easy to disable. Like I said for ESET I wish this option is presented at install time rather than opt-in by default.
- CPU usage is slightly high, around 1-2% constantly. I've noticed this cuts about an hour off of my laptop's 6 hour battery life. I think if you have a desktop this is not going to impact performance, but on a laptop, every bit of CPU usage costs precious battery life.
- Ugh, what's up with everyone loving to bundle borderline ad-ware? KTS comes with "Kaspersky Safe Connection" which is just slightly short of a front for advertising their VPN service.
Overall I'm conflicted. I like the lightness of F-Secure SAFE but from what I've seen, Kaspersky's protection seems undoubtedly better and more comprehensive. I think if I did as much high risk stuff as I did back 10 years ago, I would choose Kaspersky in a heartbeat. But for me, my laptop is the machine I use the most, and I am having trouble deciding if it's worth losing an hour of battery life.
