In SE Labs’ latest home antivirus test, McAfee got a 100% total protection rating, meaning that it blocked all malicious software and didn’t falsely identify any benign programs as malicious or potentially unwanted. Family tier subscriptions include the Safe Family parental control and tracking toolkit. You also get a copy of the McAfee True Key password manager thrown in for free, but you can do better with rivals such as Bitwarden.
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Silent detection is enabled by default to ensure that you’re not interrupted while gaming or watching videos at full screen, although the setting in question is buried in the settings menus, rather than being placed in the main interface. Similarly, there’s no dedicated webcam protection module, although McAfee’s heuristic malware detection engine watches out for potential device hijacking. However, handling ransomware threats in-engine as zero-days when detected by McAfee’s behavioural analysis is a less obtrusive approach.
Unlike many rivals, you can’t designate specific directories for the software to monitor for and block unauthorised changes to. Although McAfee’s malware defence engine includes components designed to spot the telltale behaviour of ransomware attempting to encrypt your personal files, you don’t get any direct control over this as a user. You get a lot of features packed into McAfee Total Protection, but they’re not always the ones you’d expect. Despite the 2020 sell-off of the enterprise security site of the business, the consumer anti-malware division continues as a publicly traded company, with former owner Intel still holding a 49% stake. McAfee’s an old hand at anti-malware, and it’s become a little less bloated in recent years.