Kaspersky Antivirus & Security is the mobile antivirus product for Android smartphones and tablets, developed by Kaspersky Lab. It's a security app that promises to offer top-tier security, a series of anti-theft tools that will help if you lose your Android device(s) and a range of additional features that should protect your data and your privacy. After using and testing it for more than week, today we are ready to share with you our opinion about Kaspersky Antivirus & Security. Read on and see if this is the Android security solution you've been waiting for.
What can Kaspersky Antivirus & Security do for you?
Just as its name suggests, Kaspersky Antivirus & Security is not just an antivirus, but a complete security suite that is designed to protect your Android smartphones and devices. You can get the free version of this software from Google Play , but you'll have to buy a license from Kaspersky in order to be able to use all the security modules and features that are included.
If you buy a license for Kaspersky Antivirus & Security , you will be able to use the following protection modules and features:
- Anti-Virus - the security module that protects your device against malware. It offers an on-demand scanner and a real-time antivirus engine.
- Privacy Protection - lets you temporarily hide contacts and the call and text messages history you have with them.
- Anti-Theft - uses your Kaspersky and the My Kaspersky portal in order to remotely locate and lock your Android device, turn on an alarm on it, wipe data from it, or take a mugshot of the person who stole it.
- Call & Text Filter - can be used to block unwanted contacts from calling you or sending you text messages.
- Web Protection - scans websites before you visit them and blocks those identified as delivering malicious code or trying to steal data from you.
- Text Anti-Phishing - scans the SMS text messages you receive and blocks those that contain links to dangerous websites.
Setting up Kaspersky Antivirus & Security for Android
In order to test Kaspersky Antivirus & Security , we used our test Android smartphone, a Motorola Nexus 6 running on Android 7 Nougat. After downloading the security suite from Google Play and installing it on your smartphone, the first thing you'll have to do is give the app access to your smartphone and storage, so that it can scan it for threats.
Then, you'll have to choose the country you live in, accept the End User License Agreement and the Kaspersky Security Network Statement , and create or use an existing My Kaspersky account in order to activate your subscription or trial license of Kaspersky Antivirus & Security. If you just want the free version, you can skip this step, but many features from the security suite will be disabled as a result.
Once Kaspersky Antivirus & Security is activated and ready to use, you will be asked to update the app's database and perform a first scan for malware on your Android device.
If anything suspicious is found on your Android device, Kaspersky Antivirus & Security will let you know. Also, even if everything is OK, the app will still tell you that there's an issue with your device. It will tell you that "For protection from online threats, turn on Web Protection". That's just a way of making sure that you will enable the Web Protection security module which is responsible for keeping you safe while browsing the web. That's a good approach on Kaspersky's part, so tap on this issue and follow the indications you get from Kaspersky Antivirus & Security.
It's preferable, although not mandatory, for you to resolve the other two recommendations you get: "Configure Anti-Theft to remotely lock and locate the device" and "Configure Privacy Protection".
In our opinion, Kaspersky Antivirus & Security for Android is easy to setup, although it does require you to create a My Kaspersky account in order to be able to use all its features. After all, how could you remotely locate or wipe your mobile device if you don't have an online account with access to appropriate management tools. Plus, a good thing is that you can create your account straight from the app - you don't have to use a web browser in order to do it. Finally, we like the proactive approach Kaspersky has in asking you to enable and configure the various protection modules it includes.
Using the Anti-Virus
Kaspersky Antivirus & Security offers three different antivirus scanning modes, plus a real-time protection feature.
In order to run a manual scan, all you have to do is launch Kaspersky Antivirus & Security and then tap on the Scan button. The app will then let you choose the type of antivirus scan you want to perform: Quick scan (Scan of installed apps) , Full scan (Scan off entire device) and Folder scan (Scan of a selected folder).
It took Kaspersky Antivirus & Security just 8 seconds to do a full scan of our Nexus 6 test device. That's very fast but don't forget that our smartphone had only the default Android apps installed on it. Depending on how many apps and files you have on your own Android device, a complete antivirus scan could take a lot longer for you.
The Real-time Protection works in the background and continually monitors the file activity and the apps running on your Android device. If an infected file or app is identified, Kaspersky Antivirus & Security automatically tries to clean it. Although you can disable the Real-time Protection module, we highly recommend you don't do that, because it's your first line of defense against malicious apps.
Running antivirus scans with Kaspersky Antivirus & Security is an easy task, although you will probably not have to do it very often because you also get a Real-time Protection feature in this security suite. But, if you do need to manually run antivirus scans, it's good to know - and we really appreciate this option - that you can also run custom antivirus scans of the folders you choose.
Using the Privacy Protection
The Privacy Protection module is designed to let you hide contact information like calls or SMS text messages for the people or phone numbers that you choose as private. Unfortunately, if you intend to use Kaspersky Antivirus & Security on a device running with Android 4.4 or later, the app will let you know right from the start that "Because of Android technical limitations, the Privacy Protection feature of sending and receiving messages may not work as intended".
The bad news is that the above limitation was accurate in our case. The Motorola Nexus 6 that we use as our test device runs on Android 7 Nougat and, although we were able to set the Privacy Protection feature, we couldn't enable it. Each time we tried, Kaspersky Antivirus & Security refused to work and kept on closing.
If you're using older versions of Android, the Privacy Protection feature could be useful for you. However, if you're using a device with a newer Android, it's likely that this feature will not run correctly for you.
Read the second page of this review to learn how effective are Kaspersky's anti-theft, web protection and anti-phishing modules as well as its call and text filters. You will also see our verdict about this product.
Using the Anti-Theft features
One of the most advanced and useful parts of Kaspersky Antivirus & Internet is the Anti-Theft module. Setting it up means that you have to give a few permissions, set a PIN code, and then "grant advanced permissions" for Kaspersky Antivirus & Security on your Android device. All these are things done directly from the app, and are easy to set: all you have to do is say Yes a few times. 🙂
After configuring Anti-Theft , you can use the My Kaspersky portal, or another smartphone that has Kaspersky Antivirus & Security installed on it, in order to send remote management commands to your Android device. You can locate your lost or stolen smartphone, you can activate an alarm sound on it remotely, you can lock it, wipe the private information you have on it (like messages, photos and videos) and you can also take mugshots of the person who found or stole your device.
Even more, if someone finds or steals your Android smartphone, and you activated Kaspersky's SIM Watch feature, you will also get the phone number of the new SIM card that was installed, so that you can use it to send any of the SMS commands supported by Kaspersky Antivirus & Security. But, you should know that this is a feature that's not enabled by default, probably because you must provide Kaspersky Antivirus & Security with a backup phone number before being able to use SIM Watch.
The Anti-Theft tools you get in Kaspersky Antivirus & Security cover pretty much every lost or stolen Android device situation. It may sound cynical, but you will be happy to know that you can remotely wipe your private data from your Android smartphone if it gets stolen. It's better to never know what thieves could have done with your selfies. 🙂
Using the Call & Text Filter
Similarly to call blocker apps , if there are people or companies from which you don't want to receive phone calls, text messages, or both, Kaspersky Antivirus & Security includes a Call & Text Filter which, when configured appropriately, does exactly that: when you receive a phone call or a text message from a blocked number or contact, you won't hear your smartphone ring or buzz and you won't see anything on your display. However, you will get notifications on your lock screen about the missed calls and the text messages that you received from blocked numbers.
The Call & Text Filter module offered by Kaspersky Antivirus & Security works well and helps you get control over the phone calls and text messages that you receive from unwanted people.
Using the Web Protection
The Web Protection module scans websites you're trying to visit before you actually land on them and blocks your access if they are found to contain malicious code or they are perpetrating phishing attempts.
Kaspersky says in their own Knowledge Base , that only the default web browser in Android is supported by Web Protection , which means that it works only if you use Google Chrome (or the Android Browser in very old Android versions, before Android 4.2).
However, we tested Kaspersky's Web Protection feature using not just the default Chrome web browser, but also Firefox and Opera. And much to our own surprise, we found that Web Protection works for these web browsers too. Also, it works very well, as we couldn't load any of the dozen or so malicious websites that we tried to navigate to. This is what Kaspersky Antivirus & Security kept on telling us, in each of the browsers tested:
Without a doubt, the Web Protection feature from Kaspersky Antivirus & Security is simply great and it works Chrome, Opera and Firefox.
Using the Text Anti-Phishing
The Text Anti-Phishing is a nother security feature found in Kaspersky Antivirus & Security , which is responsible for protecting you against malicious phishing links that you could receive inside SMS text messages. When such a link to a phishing website is detected in a text message you get, Kaspersky Antivirus & Security will promptly notify you so that you can avoid opening it.
You should know however, that the Text Anti-Phishing security feature is not enabled by default. If you want to benefit from its protection, you will have to turn it on manually.
Kaspersky's Test Anti-Phishing feature worked well on our test device, and we appreciate its presence as it can protect you in certain situations.
Efficiency, s peed and performance impact
Kaspersky Antivirus & Security offers plenty of security modules, but does that also mean that it's fast? Are its anti-malware features working well?
As we mentioned earlier, m anually running a full device scan of our Nexus 6 (with Android 7 and only the default apps on it) took just 8 seconds.
A metric that can give you an idea on how much Kaspersky Antivirus & Security affects the performance of your Android device is to measure the increase, or decrease, of its boot times before and after installing the app. When we say boot time, we mean the time it takes after you press the Power button to start your Android device and when the homescreen is shown for the first time. What we found is that the boot times seem to remain the same after installing Kaspersky Antivirus & Security. With and without this app installed, we measured a boot time of approximately 38 seconds. That can only be a good thing, right? 🙂
To get an even better idea on the performance impact Kaspersky Antivirus & Security has on the Android device on which you install it, we also ran a few benchmarks with the well known Vellamo app on our Nexus 6, before and after installing the security suite on it.
Just like in the case of the boot times, the Multicore tests, which measure the performance of the processor while running multiple tasks, showed that our Nexus 6 actually worked faster after installing Kaspersky Antivirus & Security on it. That is surprising, although it's a very good thing!
Vellamo's Metal tests are designed to assess the performance of an Android device when a single core of its processor is used. After installing Kaspersky Antivirus & Security, our Nexus 6 saw a decrease in performance of about 3%, which is such a small value that is rather negligible.
Finally, the Browser benchmark also showed a slight decrease of the performance of our Nexus 6 after installing Kaspersky Antivirus & Security on it. But a 4% decrease in performance is so small that's almost impossible to observe when browsing the web.
Finally, we also took a look at what independent security testing organizations had to say about Kaspersky Antivirus & Security , and what we found was also positive:
- AV-Test awarded Kaspersky Antivirus & Security with their maximum score of 6 points out of 6 both for their Protection and Usability tests.
- AV-Comparatives tested Kaspersky Antivirus & Security and found that the Android security suite has a Protection Rate of 100% and a slightly higher than others impact on battery consumption.
The benchmarks we ran confirm that Kaspersky Antivirus & Security has little to no effect on the overall performance of a modern Android device, so that can only make us happy. Secondly, we are also pleased to see that other security organisations agree with the fact that this is one of the best anti-malware solutions for Android.
Pros and cons
As far as we can see, Kaspersky Antivirus & Security is one of the best security apps for Android, because:
- It offers excellent anti-malware and anti-phishing protection
- Their Web Protection module secures not just the default Google Chrome, but also other popular web browsers like Firefox or Opera, even if they're not officially supported
- The Anti-Theft tools are very useful and they all work very well
- The user interface is easy to use and it looks great
- There's almost no negative impact on the overall performance of your Android device
There are also some weaknesses about this product:
- It doesn't include an app locking feature that you could use to secure sensitive apps from your device
- According to AV-Comparatives , it drains battery more than other security apps for Android
- We couldn't make the Privacy Protection module work on our Nexus 6 smartphone with Android 7 Nougat
Verdict
The Kaspersky Antivirus & Security app is one of the best commercial security products that you can find for Android smartphones and tablets. It offers top-notch anti-malware protection, plenty of anti-theft tools that work very well, effective web protection as well as call and text filters.
The user interface is both easy to use and it looks great. You won't have any issues in using this security product even if you are not an expert in technology.
We also liked the fact that it doesn't have a negative impact on the performance of your Android devices.
If you are looking for a very effective antivirus for your Android smartphone or tablet, Kaspersky Antivirus & Security should be on your shortlist with the best security apps to choose from.
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