Security for everyone - Reviewing Comodo Internet Security Complete 10

Comodo is a US-based company that has built itself a quite a popular brand, mainly based on their free security products like Comodo Free Internet Security or the Comodo Free Firewall. They are also developing commercial security products which offer more features than their free products. Their most complete security product at the moment is Comodo Internet Security Complete 10, and besides the antivirus engine and firewall module, it also includes features like a secure sandbox in which to run unknown applications, Wi-Fi data encryption and more. We were curious to see how useful this product is in securing your Windows devices, so we have tested it for a few days. Read this review to see what we have found:

What is Comodo Internet Security Complete good at?

Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 is an antivirus product that is good for you if:

• You are a tech-savvy computer user and want to have a lot of advanced settings available
• You want a good antivirus engine that can protect you against any malware, but which needs some manual tinkering to do its best job

Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 vs. Comodo Internet Security Pro 10

Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 includes all the features and tools offered by Comodo Internet Security Pro 10. Additionally, with Comodo Internet Security Complete 10, you also get 50GB of online storage and backup space and a subscription of 10GB of data traffic on Comodo's Trustconnect WiFi Security VPN tool. If you need these two features, then buying Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 is a better deal. Most users will be fine with Comodo Internet Security Pro 10.

Pros and cons

There are some good things about Comodo Internet Security Complete 10:

• The antivirus engine does a good job, and it can neutralize any malware it identifies
• The antivirus engine is also pretty fast for scanning your computer
• The user interface offers a lot of advanced settings, which experienced users will like

There are also several negatives to mention:

• The online protection you get from Comodo is weak and, even if you use it, you can fall prey to phishing websites rather easily
• Its protection processes are not protected from unwanted termination, which means that any malware can disable your antivirus
• It significantly increased the boot time of our Windows computer and decreased our download speed, on the internet
• Some tools and features cost extra money. For example, if you want direct customer support, you have to pay a separate fee, which is not small
• Beginners will have a hard time adjusting to the user interface and all the configuration options that are available

Verdict

Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 is a security product that is a very mixed bag. It has a few strong points and many weaknesses. We appreciated the effectiveness of the antivirus engine, and we like the fact that you can sandbox apps and executable files to test whether they are trustworthy or not. We also appreciate the wealth of advanced settings that are available. However, Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 does not protect you well against online threats, its Comodo Dragon web browser has been revealed by Google as being insecure, and some of the tools that are bundled with the security suite ask for additional money. The firewall module is average in its effectiveness, and the security suite's processes are not protected from unwanted termination. These are all reasons why we recommend that you stay away from Comodo and look for better security products.

The download and installation experience

The first step in having your computer protected by Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 is to download and install it. From the official website, you have to download Comodo's installer, which is an executable file with a small size, of only 5.24 MB. When you run the ciscomplete_installer.exe file, Comodo's installation wizard is launched, and you have to make a few choices regarding the installation. For starters, Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 asks you to choose in which language you want to use the security suite. The second thing you are asked is whether you want to "Enhance [your] web browsing experience by setting Yahoo! as [your] home page, new tab and default search engine (all supported browsers)". It is your choice whether you want to do that or not. However, we do not like this kind of tactic for changing the user's settings. Also, Yahoo! does not offer a better web browsing experience than Google or Bing do.

You get to change a few things about the installation: you can choose the installation directory, although we do not recommend that. You can also change your DNS provider to Comodo Secure DNS, which you should because it allows Comodo to protect you more efficiently when you navigate on the internet. Then, you can also choose whether you want to enable Comodo's "Cloud Based Behavior Analysis" of untrusted files and send anonymous program usage statistics to Comodo.

The installation wizard also lets you select which additional components are installed alongside the main antivirus product. By default, it installs Comodo Internet Security, Comodo Dragon Web Browser, Comodo Secure Shopping and Comodo Cloud Backup. In total, this means 697 MB of files. If you want, you can also install Comodo GeekBuddy, a tool that gives you access to Comodo's support technicians. Also, if you prefer not to install all these additional tools, disable them during this step.

During the next installation step, Comodo tries to convince you to change your default browser to Comodo Dragon - a web browser based on Chromium (just like Google Chrome and Opera) that is developed by Comodo. We do not like this, and our recommendation is for you to stick with your existing web browser. We cannot forget that Google's engineers proved that Comodo's web browser, advertised by the company to be more secure than others, is an unsafe web browser that puts its users in danger.

Once you are done with the installation customization, the installation proceeds. When done, you are invited to share your e-mail address, if you want Comodo to send you news, offers, and discounts. This is optional, so if you do not want to do it, click Finish.

Then, Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 immediately starts an automatic update of its virus definitions databases and, when done, also scans the system for malware. This first update means that you get to download another 339 MB of data. In total, the installation plus the first update equals almost 1GB of data downloaded. This is a lot if you ask us, and users with metered connections will not be happy.

While Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 was still installing the updates (which is a rather slow-paced task), our computer's desktop was "invaded" by several windows and prompts. Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 loaded its main user interface, kept the virus definitions updates window on the top, and it asked us what type of network we are connected to. Also, it opened a welcome window and loaded a gadget on the top right corner of our desktop. This approach is aggressive, and some users will feel invaded by Comodo.

Finally, you also need to reboot your Windows computer for the security suite to work as it should. So here you are: you get one more pop-up because your desktop was too clean and the user interface, the update window, the scan window, the gadget and the welcome window were not enough. 🙂

Our first interactions with Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 are a bit negative. Installing this suite means downloading a lot of data, Comodo tries to install stuff that you may not want on your computer and, when the installation is done, it opens way too many prompts and windows on your screen. Comodo's approach is anything but friendly.

Integration with Windows, web browsers and universal Windows platform apps

The first thing we looked at, regarding integration with Windows, was whether Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 disables Windows Firewall and Windows Defender. The security suite did disable Windows Defender, but it did not disable Windows Firewall. This is not good because having two firewalls that run at the same time can lead to issues and performance problems.

Then, we checked if the Comodo firewall module adjusts its settings according to the network profile you use in Windows. The first time you connect to a network, Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 asks you what kind of network that is: Public, Work or Home. These choices are inspired by Windows 7. However, Windows 10 and Windows 8.1 use only two network profiles: Private and Public. This may confuse some users.

One strange thing about Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 is the fact that you can only set this network profile (Public, Work or Home) once - when you first connect to that network. Afterwards, if you want to change the protection level of a known network, you can only set it as trusted or blocked. This only increases confusion.

On the bright side of things, Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 is well integrated with all the networking features in Windows 10. We had no problems in creating or joining Homegroups, and we had no issues when we shared files, folders or when we streamed media over the local network. Universal Windows apps also worked well, without any problems.

Regarding online security, Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 filters your internet traffic and can stop you from loading malicious websites that are found in its databases. This filtering engine works in all web browsers, regardless what you prefer using. Whether it is efficient or not, is another question, which we will answer later in this review.

Next, we used the Task Manager from Windows, to see how much RAM Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 needs to run its processes. We found that, in normal conditions, it needs only about 33 MB of RAM. We also used BootRacer to measure the boot times of our test computer before and after we installed Comodo Internet Security Complete 10. Unfortunately, after installing Comodo, our test computer's boot times increased by an average of 5 seconds. As a result, Windows 10 started 22 percent slower than before.

Another negative thing about Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 is that it does not protect its processes from termination: we could easily kill almost all of them, so malware will be able to do the same. The only process that we could not end was Comodo Secure Shopping, a feature that protects your online financial transactions. However, it does not protect you against malware.

To check whether the internet or local network speeds are affected by Comodo Internet Security Complete, we also ran a few tests with Speedtest.net and with LAN Speed Test. The data transfers within the local network appeared to be just as fast as before, but the internet speed has decreased by roughly 27 percent for the download, although the upload speed did not seem to be affected. Some security products lower the download speed of your internet connection, and Comodo is one of them.

We also noticed that, if you uninstall Comodo Internet Security Complete 10, you have to be careful because it does not remove everything it installed in the first place. All the additional features that you installed alongside the main security suite, including the Comodo Dragon web browser, remain installed on your computer. You have to remove them manually to get rid of all Comodo software on your computer. Again, many users will not appreciate this.

Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 has some issues regarding integration with Windows 10. The networking features work well, but the security suite does not disable the Windows Firewall. Although the Comodo firewall module seems to detect whether you use a private network, it also asks about your network profile and lets you select whether it is a home, public or a work network. This approach is strange and convoluted. Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 needs little RAM to keep its services up but increases the boot time, it slows down your downloads, and its processes can be easily killed by malware, leaving you completely unprotected.

On the next page of this review, you can see how easy Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 is to use and how effective is at protecting your computer from network attacks and malware. You can also see what additional features are included in this security suite, and check our recommendations for what settings you should adjust.

Ease of use and configuration

Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 has a good looking user interface. On its main console, it shows if you are secured or not, right from the start. You also get a few large tile buttons that you can click to start an antivirus scan, unblock applications, update the security suite or open the "Secure Shopping" safe environment.

If you prefer to see more details about everything, the user interface includes an "Advanced View." Click the button with the same name from the top-right corner of the window to get to it.

On the top of the user interface, Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 displays a toolbar that gives you fast access to a series of Tasks, Settings and Live Support. Although its name is not intuitive, the Tasks button is the one you have to press to get access to the actions, options, and the settings of all the protection modules that are included in this security suite.

The Tasks are divided into General Tasks, Firewall Tasks, Containment Tasks and Advanced Tasks. For a casual or average computer user, these names do not seem intuitive either, except maybe for the Firewall Tasks. You have to open the General Tasks to see that it is the place where you can start an antivirus Scan, an Update, to Unblock Applications, open Secure Shopping, Get Live Support and access Cloud Backup.

The Firewall Tasks have options related to the firewall module. You can use this area to allow or block applications from accessing the internet, Manage Networks and View Connections or manage Stealth Ports.

The Containment Tasks let you run applications in a safe environment and manage virtual containers, which is something experienced users probably appreciate.

And the Advanced Tasks let you Create Rescue Disk, a bootable CD or USB flash disk that can be used to clean heavily infected PCs, View Logs, View Quarantine and so on.

Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 offers lots of advanced settings, which is likely to make every security geek happy. However, beginners will feel intimidated by a large number of advanced settings and by their strange names.

If you need help in understanding what a particular option or setting is about, Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 offers some online help. It is comprehensive, and it is helpful, but there are some advanced settings that are hard to understand even if you read their documentation.

If you need further support, Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 offers you GeekBuddy - a tool that puts you in contact with Comodo's tech support staff. GeekBuddy is not installed by default, but if you click on the Live Support button from the main console of the security suite, you can download and install it.

The best thing about the GeekBuddy tool is that it is available 24 hours a day, each day of the week. It does, however, cost you additional money. In fact, it costs as much as a full license for Comodo Internet Security Complete 10. If you are ready to spend that kind of money, which right now on a deal is $130, you can use GeekBuddy to ask for help regarding any problem you have on your PC, ranging from problems with your antivirus to issues with your printer or sound card, for instance. This is a nice customer care service, but it should have been included in the original license cost.

If you are curious to see what happened on your computer regarding security, Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 offers both visual statistics that are easy to understand and detailed logs about every security event that took place on your PC.

Regarding alerts and notifications, Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 is neither verbose or silent. We have seen alerts about malware detections, but nothing about the firewall taking any measures.

Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 has a decent user interface that does its job. However, in the time we used this product we felt that it could have been better organized and explained. Beginners will be overwhelmed by the amount of settings and options available, and probably will not understand what many of them do.

Firewall

When you connect to a new network, the firewall module included by Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 asks what kind of network that is. Although Windows 10 has only two options for the network profiles it uses - Public and Private - Comodo's firewall gives you three choices: Home, Work and Public. These options are similar to what you can find in Windows 7 and, if you are using Windows 10 or Windows 8.1, it might be confusing that Comodo uses three profiles while Windows uses only two.

Comodo's firewall can automatically detect private networks and change its security profile accordingly. However, it is strange that Comodo does not have any evident switch for changing the protection profile once set. After searching through its user interface, we found that the Comodo firewall only lets you change a known network from Trusted to Blocked or vice versa. This does not match the "home, work, public" approach used when you connect to a network for the first time, and it is confusing.

To check how good is the firewall offered by Comodo, we ran a couple of tests with Nessus and Nmap, two of the best network vulnerabilities scanners. We ran the tests both on a Private and a Public network profile. Unfortunately, Comodo's firewall was not as good as we expected it to be. When we used a Private network profile, Nessus found 6 open ports, a vulnerability called Etherleak, with a low-security impact, and a more serious vulnerability to man-in-the-middle attacks. Nmap found 8 open ports. When we changed the network profile to Public, both Nessus and Nmap found 1 open port, but that was it. The only other information readable in any situation was the MAC address of our test computer, but that is not a significant security information.

The firewall module included by Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 is decent when you connect to public networks. However, it is weaker than we expected when you connect to private networks and leaves you vulnerable to attacks. It is also poorly designed from a usability point of view. The ever-changing names for setting the network profile, confuse users with ease.

Antivirus and antispyware

The first thing we checked about the antivirus module offered by Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 was how good it is for protecting you while online. It filters the internet traffic regardless of the web browser that you use, and that is a good thing. However, it does not appear to block malicious websites very well. We have tested the most popular web browsers today - Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer and Opera - and tried to visit a series of malicious websites. The results we got are mixed: Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 blocked our access to some but did not react in any way to others. From what we can tell, the web protection works well when malware is involved, but it is weak for protecting you against phishing sites. When the web protection works, you get a message like the one in the image below.

Next, we looked at how the antivirus module handles infected external memory drives. To do that, we placed a bunch of viruses on a USB memory stick, which we then plugged into our test computer that was running Comodo Internet Security Complete 10. The antivirus module did not scan the memory stick when plugged in, but it did start detecting viruses when we opened the contents of the memory stick in File Explorer. Comodo managed to identify and clean 8 malware files out of 12. The other 4 samples were not detected by the manual scan. However, when we tried to execute them, another 3 were detected and blocked. One was left intact. Comodo could have been better.

For our final test, we took our computer, we installed Windows 10 on it, and then infected it with plenty of malware. Then, we asked Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 to install and clean our test computer. Fortunately, the security suite did that without any major problems and, after identifying and removing a few infected files while installing, we also ran a full antivirus scan, to be sure. After ten minutes or so, our test computer was virus free and usable again. This is a good result for the antivirus engine offered by Comodo.

We also looked at how fast Comodo's antivirus engine is. We ran a full system scan on our Windows 10 partition, which has 126GB in size with 35GB of data on it. On average, Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 needed 9 minutes to scan it. It is a reasonably fast scanning engine.

To get a second opinion, we also checked what other independent IT security organizations had to say about Comodo's antivirus products:

• AV-TEST scored Comodo Internet Security Premium with 6 points out of 6 for its protection, 2 out of 6 for its performance and 4.5 points out of 6 for its usability.
• Unfortunately, neither AV-Comparatives nor Virus Bulletin analyzed Comodo's security products.

Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 offers an antivirus engine that can protect you efficiently against malware files. However, it is regrettable that it is not great at blocking malicious websites.

Extra features

Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 includes a range of extra features that may or may not prove useful to its customers:

• Comodo Dragon - a web browser based on Chromium (the same open-source browser that is at the core of Google Chrome and Opera). It promises to offer some privacy enhancements compared to Google Chrome and promises be "safer" than other web browsers. However, Google says that the Dragon web browser is not as good as the company says.
• GeekBuddy - a product that enables you to get in direct contact with Comodo's support team and get help for any problems you might have with your computer. Comodo's tech staff can help you remove viruses, but also set up a new printer for instance. However, the yearly subscription costs about as much as a full Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 license.
• Sandbox - a security feature found in Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 that lets you run any app you want in a sandboxed environment. When you do this, the sandboxed app is isolated from the operating system, and nothing it does has permanent effects on your computer. It is a useful feature especially when you deal with apps or programs that you do not trust. You can find this feature in Tasks: "Containment Tasks -> Run Virtual."
• Virtual Desktop - a virtual desktop that includes shortcuts to different web services. It also lets you run applications in a sandboxed environment, but we found that not necessary - you can sandbox apps without having to use Virtual Desktop.
• Rescue Disk - lets you create a bootable CD/DVD or USB memory stick that you can use to clean nasty malware infections with Comodo.

• KillSwitch - is an advanced task manager that includes ratings for the apps/processes that run in your computer's memory. These ratings can help you identify which processes are trustworthy and which are not.
• Secure Shopping - protects the financial transactions you do online, against fraud and interception.
• Comodo Backup - lets you store your valuable files in a secure online storage space. It offers 50GB of free backup space, but you can upgrade to more if you need to.
• TrustConnect - a VPN service that should encrypt your communications when you are connected to unsecured networks, wired or wireless. However, this tool is available only for customers who pay for this specific service. There is no trial offered, so we could not test it. If you know more about it, please share your knowledge with us, in the comments section.

Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 includes some extra tools, but only a few of them are likely to be useful to their users. Others, like GeekBuddy, cost you more money if you want to use them. We appreciate the fact that the security suite includes a VPN solution, but unfortunately, it costs extra.

Default settings you might want to adjust

Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 is well configured but, if you want to customize further the way it works, there are lots of advanced settings available. Here are a few things that you may want to adjust:

• Disable "Show welcome screen startup," "Show desktop widget" and "Play sound when an alert is shown." If you do not want Comodo to show these things or play sounds, you can find all the settings for disabling them in "Advanced Settings -> General Settings -> User Interface."
• By default the suite checks for updates every 6 hours. If you want it to check more often, you will find its settings in "Advanced Settings -> General Settings -> Updates."
• If you often work with files in your local area network, you might want to consider scanning them for malicious code in real-time, when you access them. To do that, check the setting "Enable realtime scanning of files on network" from "Advanced Settings -> Antivirus -> Realtime Scan."
• If you work in a hazardous environment, with lots of malware and threats, you might want to enable the HIPS system. HIPS stands for Host Intrusion Prevention system, and it is a technology that alerts you when a malware software or an unauthorized hacker tries to take control of your system. You can enable and configure this feature in "Advanced Settings -> HIPS -> HIPS Settings."

Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 is a security suite that is well configured by default, but because there are many settings available, you can find some that you might want to adjust.

What is your opinion about Comodo Internet Security Complete 10?

Comodo Internet Security Complete 10 has left us with a poor impression. There are some good things about it, but there are also many negatives. Also, Comodo charges many extras, increasing the total cost of ownership quite significantly. Before you close this review, share with us your opinion about this antivirus product.