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Webroot SecureAnywhere Complete 2012, people who have used it, thoughts ?


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Hello,

I am interested in getting the paid security software Webroot SecureAnywhere Complete 2012. I have seen good users reviews about it and lots of people praise about it on the internet about being a light program that would not affect your pc's performance at all and that has really fast scans. In the relative AV tests, it scored ok, I am no longer leaned to that side anymore since I understood no antivirus is foolproof and those results change a lot. So now I am more interested in just getting a program that show a relative good protection overall, since so far with any regular antivirus in the past,I have never gotten any problems on previous pcs with virus getting in it, so just to get something that is nice and the least hassle to use and that I won't be getting a bunch of update and pay this and that to often, except when really the product license is about to expire. So please tell me your thoughts, people who have used it or currently use it and the ease of use, the interface, if there are any gimmicks or anything not nice about it, that I should know about, before I invest almost 80 dollars on it.

Thanks a lot !

By the way:

This will be for my new Acer laptop which I ordered online and will receive on May 31st, 2012. Model Aspire AS5755-6647, with Windows 7 Home Premium 64bits, 2nd Generation Intel? Core? i5-2450M Processor 2.50GHz with Turbo Boost technology up to 3.1GHz - 6GB DDR3 Dual-Channel Memory and 500GB hard drive,

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Hi javierj,

I can shed some light on what makes Webroot SecureAnywhere Complete such a great security suite for your PC.

You mention that you are interested in an antivirus product that is not a "hassle" and does not require a bunch of updates but still provides you with a high level of protection. SecureAnywhere is definitely the antivirus suite you have been looking for, as it is always up-to-date and does not require any definition updates. SecureAnywhere uses a unique combination of our ever-growing cloud database along with local behavioral analysis to keep your PC protected against the latest threats, all in real-time. Because it checks the files on your system against the cloud database, the scanning itself is lightning fast and will not affect overall system performance. Even when you are not connected to the internet, there are a basic set of detection rules on your PC, along with the local behavioral analysis engine that can detect files or processes that are misbehaving. It will then Sandbox these files and or processes and the next time you are connected to the internet it will check these against the cloud. If threats are detected they will then be removed and or quarantined. The information about these threats are then uploaded to the cloud and we can then instantly protect all SecureAnywhere users. If by chance a threat did get through, SecureAnywhere will continue to scan and try to remove it. In the instances where a deep threat may have gotten through and cannot be removed by the agent, you would then be instructed to contact our great Technical Support team for assistance and Technical Support is free with your subscription. The interface itself is very clean looking and easy to understand as well.

The SecureAnywhere Complete package contains protection for up to 3 PC's as well as 3 Android or iOS devices as well. It also includes system cleanup tools and the Webroot Firewall which works with the Windows Firewall to provide you with outbound protection from threats. It also includes the Webroot Toolbar (IE and FF) which allows for Password management.

I hope this helps you understand SecureAnywhere a little more clearly. If you have additional questions, please post them and I would be happy to answer them for you.

Thanks again,

Greg

Hello,

I am interested in getting the paid security software Webroot SecureAnywhere Complete 2012. I have seen good user?s reviews about it and lots of people praise about it on the internet about being a light program that would not affect your pc's performance at all and that has really fast scans. In the relative AV tests, it scored ok, I am no longer leaned to that side anymore since I understood no antivirus is foolproof and those results change a lot. So now I am more interested in just getting a program that show a relative good protection overall, since so far with any regular antivirus in the past,I have never gotten any problems on previous pcs with virus getting in it, so just to get something that is nice and the least hassle to use and that I won't be getting a bunch of update and pay this and that to often, except when really the product license is about to expire. So please tell me your thoughts, people who have used it or currently use it and the ease of use, the interface, if there are any gimmicks or anything not nice about it, that I should know about, before I invest almost 80 dollars on it.

Thanks a lot !

By the way:

This will be for my new Acer laptop which I ordered online and will receive on May 31st, 2012. Model Aspire AS5755-6647, with Windows 7 Home Premium 64bits, 2nd Generation Intel? Core? i5-2450M Processor 2.50GHz with Turbo Boost technology up to 3.1GHz - 6GB DDR3 Dual-Channel Memory and 500GB hard drive,

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Just remember that Webroot is ending their Email security products soon.

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Hi littleneurtrino,

While it is true that Webroot has ended support for the legacy Enterprise email storage products, the various shields that make up the protection features in both the Consumer and Buisness versions of Webroot SecureAnywhere provide protection for threats that can arise from email messages, such as malicous links and atatchments.

Thanks,

Greg

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Thanks a lot Greg Davis for that valuable piece of information ! I am currently running the WebRoot SecureAnywhere Complete 2012, 14 day trial and I have to say I am loving it ! It is super light and fast scans. This is definately what I was looking for. My exhaustive research for a good antivirus is over! Once this trial is about to expire I will purchase a 3 pc license for 15 months of WebRoot SecureAnywhere Complete 2012 !

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Is it me or does this whole thread seem like an advertisement, somebody prentending to be a consumer and then a user, just this whole post seems like an infomercial for Webroot. Also look at the post count of the users involved is quite low.

Now I am a Webroot 2012 user and so far I have no complaints it's a great A/V product. But there are also many other good A/V products out there and users hould do their research and decide for themselves.

If the above posts are genuine Neowinians then I appoligise but those posts really seem like an advertisement

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My AV product license was about to expire, so I decided to look around and try something new.

After some reading I decided to try Webroot. Never have my computer been starting / running slower

than with Webroot Antivirus installed.

I Uninstalled it after a couple of days and is back with my previous product.

What a difference ... computer starts faster and runs a lot better without Webroot installed.

This thread looks like an advert, so I decided to give some real user feedback.

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You are very welcome javierj :rolleyes: . I'm glad to hear that the information I posted about SecureAnywhere was benneficial to you. Let me know if you have any other questions and I would be happy to answer them for you.

Cheers

Thanks a lot Greg Davis for that valuable piece of information ! I am currently running the WebRoot SecureAnywhere Complete 2012, 14 day trial and I have to say I am loving it ! It is super light and fast scans. This is definately what I was looking for. My exhaustive research for a good antivirus is over! Once this trial is about to expire I will purchase a 3 pc license for 15 months of WebRoot SecureAnywhere Complete 2012 !

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My AV product license was about to expire, so I decided to look around and try something new.

After some reading I decided to try Webroot. Never have my computer been starting / running slower

than with Webroot Antivirus installed.

I Uninstalled it after a couple of days and is back with my previous product.

What a difference ... computer starts faster and runs a lot better without Webroot installed.

This thread looks like an advert, so I decided to give some real user feedback.

Thats strange my experience is the complete opposite of yours.

Since going from Avast to Webroot Secure Anywhere Essentials 2012 my computer is so much faster!

In my opinon Webroot Secure Anywhere is fantastic!

Its so light, simple to use, and has very good protection

There are of coruse like any AntiVirus software some bugs that need to be fixed but for the most part I simply love Secure Anywhere.

I used Avast for many many years and in my opinon it has way to many modules for different things that will slow down your computer and internet speed.

With Secure Anywhere its almost like I do not even have a Antivirus installed. Thats how light it is :)

Cloud AntiVirus is the only way to go for a fast PC!

Also I highly recommend doing a clean install of Windows when installing Secure Anywhere instead of uninstalling your old AntiVirus and installing Secure Anywhere. Much less chance of problems that way.

Until something even better comes along its Secure Anywhere for me :)

And no I do not work for Webroot.

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Well prior to Webroot, I used f-secure and prior to that was Eset Nod32, Eset was good but too expensive at the time. I decided to try Webroot and it it nice and fast seemed good at the time, last night I decided to do a complete scan of my C:\ drive, as I did prior to purchasing it, back then there were no threats, last night I performed a "System Scan" with WR and nothing found, I decided to scan C:\ afterwards and after scanning for over 8 hours it has detected 7 threats so far, so once it has completed it will rescan again, hopefully doesn't take another 8+ hours. So i am not really impress with WR as my idea would be to stop these threats BEFORE they are installed on my PC. After researching AV-TEST.ORG, it now seems BIT Defender is the award winner.

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+Kosh Naranek,

This thread was started by someone who was looking for advice for an antivirus solution and he specifically asked about Webroot SecureAnywhere. All I did was provide him with the correct information about our products and how they differ than other solutions.

As to the issue you had with SecureAnywhere I'm sorry to hear that you experienced an overall slowdown and I can tell you that this behavior is not something we see very often. One of the things that sets SecureAnywhere apart for other antivirus solutions is how few System resources it uses and how it was designed to be aq "set it and leave it" solution that is always up-to-date without requiring any user intervention. After the quick 40 second installation, it automatically scans your computer for threats. Did you allow the initial scan after installation to complete? if so, were you alerted to any infections?

The oither possibility is that you may have had an expired antivirus application on your system that may have caused the conflict. Either way, if you had contacted our Support Team i'm certain they would have been abkle to quickly resolve the issue that was causing the slowdown. Another great feature of SecureAnywhere is that we offer all of our customer free Technical Support, which is accessable directly from within the SecureAnywhere interface. We also offer free Technical Support via telephone as well.

Thanks,

My AV product license was about to expire, so I decided to look around and try something new.

After some reading I decided to try Webroot. Never have my computer been starting / running slower

than with Webroot Antivirus installed.

I Uninstalled it after a couple of days and is back with my previous product.

What a difference ... computer starts faster and runs a lot better without Webroot installed.

This thread looks like an advert, so I decided to give some real user feedback.

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Well my Webroot SA 2012 scan was completed after 15+hrs and it found 7 "threats", all of them were false positives,there was 6 dump files from my Magicjack when I was trying to get the MJ to work with s.p.i.c. for my android phone. and the other 1 file was a network scanning tool, that could be classified as a hacking tool., It's unfortunate I already paid for this software, but I may consider this a lesson learned and probably try some other A/V product from a company that is more experienced.

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Hi xpablo,

Unless you have a very old computer with limited RAM and/or multiple infections, a 15 hour scan time is very unnusual for SecureAnywhere. If you create a Support Ticket (which you can do by selecting the "Help & Support" link within SecureAnywhere, and then choosing "Open a Support Ticket" on the right side of the webpage that appears, our technicans can then analyze the log files from SecureAnywhere to determine what is causing the scan to go so slow. As far as MajicJack, I did a check and we have never had any customers who have experienced any false positive issues, etc. Since you have already purchased SecureAnywhere and free Technical Support is included with your subscription, I would suggest that you go ahead and open a ticket so that our team can help resolve any of the issues you experienced.

Thanks

Well my Webroot SA 2012 scan was completed after 15+hrs and it found 7 "threats", all of them were false positives,there was 6 dump files from my Magicjack when I was trying to get the MJ to work with s.p.i.c. for my android phone. and the other 1 file was a network scanning tool, that could be classified as a hacking tool., It's unfortunate I already paid for this software, but I may consider this a lesson learned and probably try some other A/V product from a company that is more experienced.

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AV-Comparatives show Webroot 2012 as having the most False positives of any product bringing the score down heavily...

I'm willing to give the product a go but not risking having it delete something I don't want it to...

Can you confirm the problem is resolved?

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Hi,

If a file is incorrectly identified by SecureAnywhere as being malicous it would be moved to the the Quarantine section first. From there you could easily restore the file to it's original location. When there is a False Positive detected there are two ways to submit the file to our threat research department - using the "Submit a File" option from the System Tools tab in the SecureAnywhere interface, or for a faster response, you can submit the file by opening a Support Ticket .

As far as the AV-Comparatives test goes, a lot of the testing done by places like AV Comparatives do not reflect real-world scenarios that SecureAnywhere customers would encounter. For a more detailed explination of Webroot's stance on testing results, please see this entry by "MikeM" on the Webroot Community. Mike is responsible for product development at Webroot and his explination and follow-up responses are great. Also, because of the cloud database model that SecureAnywhere uses, if a False Positive is found and submitted to us, we are then able to instantly update the cloud so that no other users would have this file(s) flagged.

Thanks

"AV-Comparatives show Webroot 2012 as having the most False positives of any product bringing the score down heavily...

I'm willing to give the product a go but not risking having it delete something I don't want it to...

Can you confirm the problem is resolved?"

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Well your support is very proactive, I think I will give your software a trial...

I would like to point out though that you guys did commission Passmark to conduct similar tests to some of the AV Comparative ones that show you in a good light..

But I will be subjective - I hate fanbois and if your software is good, I will use it :)

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Hi there,

I'm really happy to hear that you will be giving SecureAnywhere a test drive and I'm hopeful that you will find it a valuable tool for securing your computer and mobile devices. If you have any questions or concerns about SecureAnywhere please let me know and I would be happy to answer them.

As far as the commissioning of the Passmark test, these tests can be commissioned by any vendor so that they can objectively evaluate their products against other products in the industry. Because SecureAnywhere is so unique in the way that it operates differently than other security products, we wanted to have objective third-party data to validate what we brought to the market.

If you look at the Passmark test from February 2012, you will see that test was commissioned by Symantec and SecureAnywhere outscored Norton here as well.

Thanks again and have a Great Day :rolleyes:

Well your support is very proactive, I think I will give your software a trial... I would like to point out though that you guys did commission Passmark to conduct similar tests to some of the AV Comparative ones that show you in a good light.. But I will be subjective - I hate fanbois and if your software is good, I will use it :)
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Sorry but I forgot to include the other Passmark study that I mentioned in my response so Here it is.

Thanks again

Well your support is very proactive, I think I will give your software a trial...

I would like to point out though that you guys did commission Passmark to conduct similar tests to some of the AV Comparative ones that show you in a good light..

But I will be subjective - I hate fanbois and if your software is good, I will use it :)

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I use it, and it works extremely well for what I need it for. Couldn't ask for more than that, IMO! Non-intrusive, no nags, and it gets what most of my AV misses. (At least, as far as I know) Good stuff!

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Just newly registered to give my thoughts on SecureAnywhere (don't worry... I've been lurking since 2004).

The high level of success by SA is largely achieved by having a low bar for detection, which decreases false negatives but significantly increases false positives. In such a manner, it can provide superior detection and protection, but at the cost of accidentally hitting a few non-malicious files along the way. Most users aren't going to have issues with that, but it does mean that it can do harm in addition to good. If anyone has experience in biostatistics, you'll understand when I say that SA's sensitivity is so high that its risk-benefit ratio for some users might be unfavorable.

Not to harp on my personal preferences for too long, but I want my AV's true positive/false positive ratio to be as high as possible and the true negative/false negative ratio to be high.

The problem with SA (at least with the results I've seen) is that they increase the true positive ratio by increasing the sensitivity, which also increases the false positive ratio. It's great that it can detect, say, 10,000 threats and come up with only 7 false positives, but when other AV can detect 9,999 threats and come up with only 1 false positive, that's a better program IMO. The true negative/false negative ratio is just as important, but I think that since SA's sensitivity is so high, that ratio is massively high, which is great. It's just that the true positive/false positive ratio is too low.

A lot of the other antivirus programs seem to be more balanced, and certainly there are others that seem to be better at heuristics. It's been documented several places with pretty rigorous testing that SA doesn't quite meet the praise that's been showered upon it, and it's not just the false positive rate. SA for some reason has issues when multiple pieces of malware and multiple viri hit it at the same time. Several of those are able to save, install, and run despite SA being installed, and even with a full scan and boot scan, SA can't detect them. Furthermore, at least one piece of malicious software is able to prevent SA from even loading on reboot.

Don't get me wrong -- it's a great program, and provides protection against a large majority of threats, but it is not massively better than everything else out there. In truth, the stalwarts of AV software have products that seem to be better, if only slightly (particularly ESET, Norton's latest, and F-secure). Granted, there is no perfect AV, and the fact that SA has come so close is saying a lot. But I truly do NOT think that people should be rushing out there to buy it over other fantastic antivirus programs without first thinking about what they value in an antivirus program as well as their usage patterns.

For me, I use Chrome + AdBlock Plus. I don't click stupid links. I use a non-administrator account for everyday use. I run MBAM once a week. I do download torrents a lot, but I use a pretty reputable repository. My computer has 12GB RAM, a 2.4GHz Core i7, and 2x7200RPM HDDs in RAID0, so performance is a very tiny issue when not performing a full scan, which is done at night while I'm not working on the computer anyway. In all, my chance of infection is pretty low and resources not much of an issue, and so the false positive rate is a significant drawback. I purchased ESET for my new W7 PC back in March over SA, Norton, F-secure, and various other free AV because it does a great job at detection of true infections (perhaps not quite as good as SA) while also providing almost zero false positives (one single keygen was identified as a false positive, which is largely excusable for SA or anyone else).

I do hope that Webroot continue to work on the product, as it shows great promise as a lightweight, fast AV for protection and detection. But I'm not sure the praise so many are eschewing is earned at this point for ALL users.

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Hi,

Actually SecureAnywhere has a very high detection and removal rate with the default settings applied. The FP?s that have been detected in the past were not system files or very popular files and only affected a small set of users. If you look at the =121361"]April test results from AV-Test.Org you will see that our FP detection during a scan was down to 0.

We are currently working on a new FP module which will significantly reduce FP?s and it will be released soon.

We are continually improving every aspect of SecureAnywhere and we post detailed Release Notes on the Webroot Community Forums that includes Improved Features, Additional Features, Fixes and other updates to the product. We are also very interested in any suggestions that our customers may have and if you?d like, you can contribute to the Ideas Exchange section of our Community.

Thanks

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Hi Warwagon,

I don't even know where to begin except to say that your testing methedology does not mimic real-world usage by customers of SecureAnywhere. For a more detailed explination of what I mean please read this post on the Webroot Community from Mike Malloy who is in Product Development at Webroot.

Thanks,

Greg

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