Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro Edition 2.0

Antivirus protection is an absolute necessity for the modern PC, but alone it's not sufficient to guarantee security. At the very least you need a two-way firewall as well; adding phishing protection and other security features couldn't hurt. Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro Edition 2.0 ($29.99 direct) combines antivirus, firewall, antiphishing, and a few other features, making it a small-scale security suite. Based on our testing, though, you might be better off just combining Panda's free antivirus with a free firewall.

The same miniscule program that installs Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition 2.0 (free, 3.5 stars) will install the Pro edition too, if you have a registration key. You can also upgrade the Free edition to Pro at any time.

Same Protection Against Malware
The antivirus component is the same for both editions, so I'll just summarize my results from testing the Free edition here. For full details, please read that review.

Panda Cloud Antivirus is best at keeping malware from gaining a foothold on a clean PC. It had trouble installing or running on many of my test systems. Fortunately, Panda offers a large number of tools to help out with the cleanup process. Unfortunately, they were all needed, and getting some of the test systems cleaned up took several days.

Thanks in no small part to Panda Cloud Cleaner, Panda SafeDisk, and remote-controlled use of the PSCAN tool, Panda detected 84 percent of the threats and scored 5.4 of 10 possible points for removal. With 6.4 points, Bitdefender Total Security 2013 ($79.95 direct for three licenses, 4 stars) has the best score among products tested with my current malware collection. For details on how I perform this analysis, see How We Test Malware Removal.

Panda was much more effective at blocking new malware attacks. It detected 92 percent of the threats and scored 9.2 of 10 possible points, and earned 10 of 10 points for blocking rootkits. The most effective malware blocker among products tested with the same sample set was SecureIT Plus ($5.95/month direct, 2 stars), with 9.7 points. The article How We Test Malware Blocking explains how I derive these scores.

Most of the independent antivirus labs include Panda's technology in their tests. It gets good marks overall, though it's not at the level of top-scoring vendors like Bitdefender, Kaspersky, and Symantec. The chart below summarizes recent results, and the article How We Interpret Antivirus Lab Tests introduces the various labs.

Limited Phishing Protection
Panda's URL filter keeps users from accidentally visiting malicious or fraudulent (phishing) sites. Both editions get the benefit of this protection, but in testing it proved less than fully effective. It didn't block any actual malicious sites, though the antivirus caught some threats during the download process. Its phishing detection rate lagged 68 percentage points behind Norton and one point behind Internet Explorer alone. The article How We Test Antiphishing explains how I obtain the freshest phishing URL samples and derive these scores.

Panda doesn't include a parental control component, but if you were desperate to know what websites have been visited from your family's computer, you might conceivably use the URL monitor feature. Present in both Free and Pro editions, this feature lists recently executed programs and optionally tracks all URLs visited by each.

If the programs report reveals that a suspicious program has been connecting with shady websites, you can click a button to block the program. Doing so puts it in Panda's Recycle Bin and prevents it being used.

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