Panda Dome Offers
Panda Dome Advanced is a powerful security suite that sits right in the middle of Panda's product line. That means you get not only Panda Free's antivirus and 150MB/day VPN, but also Panda's firewall, network protection, and cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Android) support. Panda Dome Advanced adds three additional tools: parental controls for Windows, identity protection, and an extra layer of security to protect you against ransomware and "advanced threats."
Panda offers more powerful suites. Dome Complete offers encryption, a password manager, and device cleaning and maintenance. And Dome Premium gives you unlimited full VPN, Windows and software update manager and unlimited "24/7 premium tech support".
If you're not looking for every possible security extra, or are just tired of overweight feature-packed suites you never use, then Panda Dome Advanced might be the perfect balance of power and price.
- Panda Dome subscription options:
- Panda Dome for €29.49 per year
Packages and rates
Panda Dome Advanced has a flexible but also complicated pricing system, with many more options than we usually see.
You could pay €42,74 to cover a device for a year, say €57 at renewal. But covering three devices only bumps the price up to €64.49 (€86 on renewal), and there are also options to cover ten devices (€88.50 first year, €118 after) and there's even an unlimited license (€102 first year). , €136 after).
Extending the license to two or three years saves money. A two-year license for three devices costs €114.74 initially, €153 upon renewal; a three-year license for ten devices costs €267 in the first quarter, €356 on renewal.
If you're not ready to commit a large amount of money, you can also opt for monthly billing for €5.99 (Panda even gives you the first month for free).
It is a little more expensive than some, and there are cheaper offers. Bitdefender Total Security has more features, for example, but a big introductory discount means you can cover five devices for just €40 in the first year (€90 on renewal). It's a similar story with Kaspersky, where you get a 50% discount in the first quarter. But Panda wins on billing flexibility: Most providers don't have unlimited device licenses or a monthly payment option.
Interface
Panda Dome's interface immediately stands out with its desktop-style wallpaper. It looks nice, but it creates an immediate usability problem. The app has four rows of buttons for various functions, but Panda is so keen on leaving space for you to view the photo that only the first row of buttons is visible. You have to scroll down to access everything.
There's another small annoyance in a regularly updated banner at the bottom of the dashboard, with links to various blog posts on the Panda site. We found a "Show Panda News" toggle in settings and turned it off, hoping it would help; but no, nothing changed. (We checked the Panda support site to find out what "Show Panda News" was supposed to do, but couldn't find it anywhere. Not an encouraging start.)
Otherwise the main interface works fine. The functions are accessible through 17 buttons (analysis, firewall, support, etc.). That's a lot, but the button icons do a reasonable job of telling you what they're doing, and you can enable captions for all buttons with one click. Selecting a button takes you to this feature, where a Back button takes you back to the main dashboard when you're done. It's not perfect - too many buttons just open a browser tab, rather than doing anything locally - but we found it easy enough to use.
personal protection
Sometimes malware tries to disable an antivirus before launching a full infection attempt, so it's important that any security app can defend itself.
Testing Panda's self-protection revealed some vulnerabilities. One of our test attacks successfully disabled part of Panda's real-time file scanning system, allowing us to download malicious files undetected. The second effectively removed all of Panda's layers of protection, allowing the malware to do whatever it wanted.
These exploits required an attacker to convince you to run a malicious script or macro on your system, with administrator rights. A common example would be through spam, with text that convinced you to open an attached Office document and then run an embedded macro.
We reported our findings to Panda. The company said that these security vulnerabilities: "could only be exploited by malware that has elevated administrator rights and was not detected by any of our technologies (signatures, cloud, heuristics, popups, protection behavior, etc.). Panda He also said that he "took note" of our suggested fix for the most important attack, but made no commitment to implement it.
While it is true that this attack is often unsuccessful, the reality is that most antivirus competitors protect themselves much better. 90% and more just block our attacks, making sure they have no effect. Kaspersky and Trend Micro go further, recognizing attacks as malicious actions and immediately removing our test tool, preventing it from trying anything else. Panda looks weak, by comparison.
antivirus
Panda Dome Advanced has several scanning options. A critical zone scan checks the most frequently infected areas of a PC in about five minutes; custom scan only inspects the files or folders you specify; and the full system scan, of course, checks everything.
If that's not enough, you can also set up multiple scheduled scans. These start with critical areas, full system, or custom scan, but you can also exclude particular folders or file types (useful for speeding up scans).
We notice an unusual omission. Panda Dome Advanced does not integrate with Explorer, so right-clicking on a file or folder does not bring up the "Scan with Panda" option. The only way to check a specific item is to manually open the app, choose a custom scan, and manually select a folder. It's a nuisance we don't see anywhere else.
Scan times were reasonable during testing. Panda Dome Advanced verified our 50 GB of test executables in 39 minutes for the first scan, in the range of 15 to 50 minutes that we normally see. There is some optimization for subsequent scans, and it took Panda 24 minutes to perform scan #2. However, others go further: Bitdefender only checks new and changed files, and in a recent study, its second scan was completed in less than a minute.
protection
AV-Comparatives' Real-World Protection Test is a comprehensive benchmark that pits the 17 major antivirus engines against the latest malware.
Panda performed well in the July-October 2021 report, earning second place as one of only three vendors to block 100% of test threats (Trend Micro and Norton were the others).
There is a potential problem in Panda's relatively high number of false positives: 25, the second highest in the report. This is important because it is much easier to block all threats if you stop all processes that appear slightly suspicious. Most companies are much more specific in their guidance; Kaspersky came in fourth place, blocking 99,9% of threats, but with no false positives; Avast also blocked 99,9% and only had two.
Panda is not currently tested in SE-Labs or AV Test, so we were unable to get confirmation of the scores from AV-Comparatives.
Data hijacking
We tested the antivirus by checking how each engine handles our own simple custom ransomware. Since it never appeared in the wild, there's no way an antivirus has seen our mock threat before, making it a useful test of its behavioral monitoring capabilities.
Panda Dome Advanced got off to a bad start, bypassing our ransomware and allowing it to encrypt thousands of Office documents, images, and more. Our test threat isn't actual malware, and we can't say for sure why Panda didn't see it, so we're not going to treat that as a big black mark. But many competitors do better. For example, Bitdefender, Kaspersky, and Trend Micro recognized the threat in a fraction of a second and removed our test app before it did any more damage.
But Panda wasn't done yet. It also includes a Data Protection feature that monitors access to key folders, alerts you to unknown apps trying to modify files, and doesn't allow such access until you confirm the app is safe.
There are problems with this scheme. It is not enabled by default, for example. Initially it only covers your Documents folders. It's also not clear to users, who can only notice it by tapping Settings and scrolling through the list of folders.
However, if you enable Data Shield and see how it works, and manually add the folders you want to protect, we found that the feature works well. When we ran our test ransomware this time, Panda raised a new "is it ok?" notice for each access to the file, giving us a warning of what was happening.
This still can't be compared to the competitors that detected and removed our threat in the first place (although it couldn't encrypt files in protected folders, the simulator still worked and could theoretically launch another type of attack). But our data was in less secure, and that's a big plus.
anti-phishing
One of Panda Free Antivirus's weaknesses is that it doesn't block phishing or other dangerous URLs. Fortunately, this does not apply to Panda Dome Advanced and other commercial suites, which add a safe browsing module to protect you online.
To test this, we obtained a list of the most recent phishing URLs, confirmed that they were still active, and then attempted to visit them on a system protected by Panda Dome Advanced.
Measuring the reliability of phishing detection is tricky, but we found that Panda added some useful extra protection, preventing us from accessing dangerous websites that Chrome missed.
There is a small usability problem. Panda's 'Page Blocked' warning box has...