Kaspersky Total Security
Description
I have a complicated relationship with Kaspersky. For approximately 5 years, from about 2017 to 2022, it was the best antivirus I had ever used. Not the cheapest, not the flashiest but pound for pound the most effective at catching things that other products missed. I recommended it to friends, installed it on family member computers and honestly thought that the geopolitical concerns about a Russian security company were paranoia overblown that had nothing to do with the quality of the software. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and the US government went from vague warning to outright ban, and I was staring at my Kaspersky dashboard wondering if defending my file system to a company headquartered in Moscow was a position I was comfortable holding. I switched to Bitdefender in late 2022, and the story of why is basically the story of Kaspersky itself.
Kaspersky Total Security was the company’s highest tier consumer product for years — the suite that put it all together. Real-time malware protection, firewall, anti-phishing, password manager, parental controls, webcam protection, file encryption vault, secure browser for online banking, virtual keyboard to beat keyloggers, back up tools, and rudimentary VPN with 300 MB daily limit. It was truly one of the most feature complete security suites on the market. In 2023, Kaspersky reorganized its product line and replaced Total Security with three new tiers — Standard, Plus and Premium — but the DNA is the same. If you purchased Total Security before the change, you know what those new plans include because it is very much the same feature set rearranged and repriced.
The crown jewel was always the malware engine. Independent Labs treated Kaspersky like the kid in class who ruins the curve for everyone. AV-Test constantly awarded it 6 out of 6 in terms of protection, performance, and usability. AV-Comparatives gave it top marks with close to perfect detection rates and very few false positives. In my own experience, the real time scanner was aggressive in the best possible way. I have a small home server which is occasionally probed by bots, and Kaspersky detected network intrusion attempts that Norton and McAfee had both missed over previous stints on the same machine. The System Watcher functionality which monitors program behavior for ransomware-like activity caught a test sample I intentionally ran before the file had even finished writing to disk. I never had a single infection during five years of use, and I wasn’t exactly practicing safe browsing habits during this entire time.
The feature that deserves particular mention is the Safe Money feature because it solved a problem that I did not know I had. Whenever you visit a banking or shopping website, Kaspersky offers to open it in a hardened browser environment that checks for rootkits, certificate problems and untrusted modules before allowing the page to load. It added maybe ten seconds to the process, which was mildly annoying on every transaction, but knowing that my bank login was taking place inside a sandboxed environment with keylogger protection was worth the wait. No other antivirus I have used since has done something equivalent as smooth.
Parental controls were solid — web filtering by category, screen time limits, app usage monitoring, GPS tracking on mobile devices. Not as polished as the standalone Norton Family product, but for something bundled inside of an antivirus suite at no extra cost, it covered the basics well enough that I did not need a separate tool. The password manager was decent, cross-platform and reliable in syncing. The file shredder and encryption vault were features I think were a little bit of a niche that I maybe used twice, but they were there and they worked.
And then there is the Russia problem.
Kaspersky Lab was founded in Moscow in 1997 by Eugene Kaspersky who studied at a KGB-sponsored technical institute. That fact in and of itself does not make the company compromised, but it set the stage for decades of suspicion. In 2017, the US government prohibited Kaspersky from all federal agency computers after reports emerged that Russian hackers had used the software to steal classified NSA materials from a contractor’s home computer. Kaspersky denied involvement, offered to allow governments to audit their source code, and eventually relocated some of their data processing infrastructure to Switzerland in what it called a Global Transparency Initiative. For a while, that seemed like enough.
Then there was the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Germany’s cybersecurity agency warned consumers not to use Kaspersky. Lithuania and Netherlands dragged it out of government systems. In June 2024, the US Department of Commerce issued a full ban – not just on government use, but on all sales of Kaspersky products to US persons. The company was given until September 29, 2024 to give final updates to existing US customers. After that date no more virus definitions, no more security patches, nothing. Kaspersky responded by auto-migrating some US users to UltraAV, a product from a different company, without clearly explaining what was going on — which helped generate its own wave of confusion and anger.
If you are in the United States, this review is effectively a history lesson. You can’t buy Kaspersky, you can’t get updates, you can’t run an antivirus that doesn’t receive new threat definitions, and running an antivirus that doesn’t receive new threat definitions is worse than not running an antivirus at all because you get a false sense of security from it. If you are outside of the US, the situation is more nuanced. Kaspersky still operates in more than 200 countries, the product still scores on top of independent lab tests, and no government has ever publicly demonstrated that the software has backdoors or that it has been used to spy on consumers. The risk is theoretical — but it is theoretical in the way that leaving your house keys with someone you are not entirely sure you trust is theoretical. Nothing has gone wrong yet, but the potential consequences should something go wrong are severe.
I miss using it and I’m not ashamed to admit that. The interface was clean, the performance impact was negligible, the protection was best-in-class, and the price was competitive — around $28 for the first year of Standard, $57 for renewal. Bitdefender, which I switched to, is excellent in its own right but Kaspersky’s System Watcher and Safe Money features have no direct equivalent that works as seamlessly. Every few months I read about Kaspersky getting another perfect result in an AV-Test evaluation and feel a little pang of regret, followed by the reminder that I would rather have slightly less sophisticated malware detection than to wonder if my security software’s parent company is legally obligated to cooperate with the Russian intelligence services.
Should you use it? If you are in the US, the question is moot — you cannot. If you are in a different location and the geopolitical aspect is really not your concern, Kaspersky is one of the most capable antivirus products ever created, and the pricing is undercutting most of the Western competition. But “genuinely does not concern you” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and I think for most people in most situations, the peace of mind that comes with a product that does not require you to have an opinion on Russian foreign policy is worth the marginal trade-off in detection rates. There are some excellent alternatives. Use one of them, and save yourself the argument you will inevitably have with someone at a dinner party who finds out what antivirus you run.
