Bitdefender Internet Security 2015 antivirus review

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Our Verdict

This is one of the very best AV suites available, in terms of outright protection against malware. It’s also very good at not throwing up false warnings, but there are other products offering more auxiliary modules for the money.

Bitdefender is a highly rated internet security provider and the latest version of its Internet Security suite includes several new features to expand its coverage and ease of use. It includes many of the major modules you’d expect in an IS suite with anti-virus software, anti-spyware, online protection – including internet banking – and tune-up. (See also:  Best antivirus software in the UK.)

Innovations in this edition include pre-defined profiles to adjust settings for specific uses, like movies, work or games, a start-up organiser and PC tune-up with a one-click optimiser. You don’t get a two-way firewall, parental control, backup, online storage or device anti-theft, though these are available in the £60, Bitdefender Total Security.

The main control window is clean, with Modern-style tiles for the main and subsidiary functions. The three big tiles provide access to Protection, Privacy and Tools, while the four smaller ones are labelled Scan, Update, Safepay and Optimize. Each tile leads to a setting and report screen, breaking down the options within the modules of the suite. (See also:  2015’s best antivirus for PC and laptop UK.)

The new one-click optimizer looks at junk files, registry entries and privacy issues and can sort them all in at least a couple of clicks.  On our test system, it offered to recover 3.7GB of unnecessary files and sort out lots of registry and privacy issues. It’s an all or nothing approach, though, without the ability to select which issues to resolve.

The Startup optimizer does a similar thing for programs automatically run when Windows launches, but shows a lot more info, detailing all the apps that auto-start and the time it takes to start them, so you can select any you want to remove from the list.

Profiles, also new, limit the actions Bitdefender will take, so any impact on your system when watching a movie or playing a game is reduced.

Bitdefender Internet Security 2015 review: test results

Testing Bitdefender Internet Security’s scan rate showed it examining 78,749 files in 28 minutes 24 seconds, a moderate rate of 45.7 files/s, though a rerun cut the number to 14,693 in 3min 37s, a good degree of file marking.  Bitdefender claims zero impact on performance, but we recorded a 21 percent increase in file copy time, when a scan was running in the background.

This isn’t reflected in the results AV-Test (www.av-test.org) produced, though, where they did indeed record no slowdown at all when running through a number of typical tasks, including downloading software and visiting websites. This gave it a score of 6.0/6.0 under Performance.

Bitdefender exceptionally good at not warning or blocking legitimate software and only gave one false detection in the 525,920 samples AV-Test tested it with. This earned the software another 6.0/6.0 in the Usability section.

In perhaps the most important section of the tests, the software scored a perfect 100 percent in detecting established malware of the two months of the test. It dropped just half a percent  to 99.5 percent when looking for zero-day threats, too, against a group average of 97 percent. So, with another 6.0/6.0 under its belt, it finished with an overall score of 18.0/18.0, the joint highest in the group. (See also:  2015’s best antivirus for PC and laptop UK.)