When antivirus utilities expand into full-scale security suites, we're accustomed to seeing them add performance tune-up tools, perhaps to offset any perceived slowdown caused by security functions. With IOBit, things are the other way around. The company's main focus is tuning performance, with antivirus capabilities added only in the top-of-the-line IObit Advanced SystemCare Ultimate. The current version 11 adds ransomware protection, among other enhancements, but testing revealed a big hole in protection against ransomware, and the product failed some of our hands-on tests. IObit's products are almost always steeply discounted, but at first glance, the list price of this mini-suite and of the standalone tune-up tool appear the same—$49.99 for use on three PCs. In truth, there's a big difference. You can purchase the tune-up utility once and use it for as long as you like, paying again only if you upgrade to a more advanced version. Advanced SystemCare Ultimate, like almost every other antivirus tool, is a subscription, $49.99 per year. Given the need for constant vigilance and antivirus updates, the subscription model does make sense. IObit's pricing is in line with competing products. Webroot costs the same as IObit for three licenses. Norton charges the same $49.99, but for one license. Bitdefender, Kaspersky, and Webroot charge $59.99 for three licenses. That same $59.99 gets you licenses to install McAfee AntiVirus Plus on all your devices. Shared Tune-Up Features The Ultimate edition includes all the tune-up features found in IObit Advanced SystemCare PRO. Please peruse that review for full details of our findings, beyond the summary below. In this review, we'll focus on the antivirus. Installation is quick and simple. During the install process, both for the tune-up tool and Ultimate, it offered to install adaware web companion. In both cases, we chose to stick with the product at hand. Do note that where this product offers three licenses, AVG TuneUp and Iolo System Mechanic, our Editors' Choice products for tune-up utilities, impose no such limit. Some components remain inactive until you turn them on. Among these are Surfing Protection, Browser Anti-Tracking, Real-time Protector, and FaceID. This last one is interesting. You configure it to recognize your own face in the webcam, and it warns if it detects an unknown face. Some of these components require a separate download. Surfing protection is one such; it marks up unsafe links in search results and steers you away from fraudulent (phishing) websites. When you launch a scan, it looks for startup items, privacy traces, junk files, invalid shortcuts, problems in the registry, and spyware threats. The product doesn't clarify precisely what it means by spyware threats. Fixing detected problems can free up disk space and improve performance. Among the other privacy and performance features are: Security Reinforce, which diagnoses security weaknesses; HomePage Advisor, which protects against browser hijacking; Disk Cleaner, which removes junk files; and Performance Monitor, a desktop widget that tracks RAM and CPU usage. On the Speed Up tab, Turbo Boost kills unnecessary services for a performance boost, Hardware Accelerate looks for old drives, Deep Optimization goes beyond basic tune-up, and App/Toolbar Cleaner advises installing IObit Uninstaller to clean up unwanted apps. We found Advanced SystemCare Pro to be brimming with opportunities to install other IObit programs. Some were free, which is fine, but we weren't pleased to find that others required a separate payment. Time tests, detailed in the full review, showed that the tune-up process measurably improved performance. Exercising the test system after tune-up, we found it noticeably snappier. Advanced SystemCare Pro earned 3.5 stars in our review. Still, our Editors' Choice tune-up utilities remain Iolo System Mechanic and AVG TuneUp. The Ultimate Protection? Installing Advanced SystemCare Ultimate is just as quick and simple as installing the basic tune-up utility. The product uses the same dark blue background, with white text and as-if glowing blue icons. But in the Ultimate edition, the default tab is Antivirus, not Clean & Optimize. On this tab, IObit shows three big icons for Quick Scan, Full Scan, and Custom Scan. A full scan took one hour and 15 minutes, which is a good bit longer than the current average of about 50 minutes. However, this product relies on Bitdefender's engine, and Bitdefender Antivirus Plus took an hour and 16 minutes, so this result is totally consistent. Many antivirus utilities leverage the first full scan to identify safe files, ones that need no further scanning. This kind of optimization can really speed up subsequent scans. A full scan with Norton ran nearly two hours; the repeat scan finished in 15 minutes. Avast Pro Antivirus went from over an hour the first time to less than a minute on the second full scan. IObit managed a repeat scan in 15 minutes, demonstrating that it does use some form of optimization. We floundered for a bit looking for promised features, especially ransomware protection. We finally realized that clicking the link Protection details displayed nine components. Six of these appeared in the Protect tab in the plain tune-up utility. The Ultimate edition adds Anti-ransomware Engine and Auto-Silent mode, as well as a switch to turn Windows Firewall on if it's not enabled. Silent mode suppresses notifications while a full-screen program is active; I'll discuss ransomware protection below. No Help From the Labs Dedicated researchers at independent testing labs around the world spend their days collecting malware samples and testing various facets of antivirus protection. We follow four such labs closely: AV-Test Institute, AV-Comparatives, SE Labs, and MRG-Effitas. The higher the scores, the better, and the more labs testing a product, also the better. Alas, none of these four directly test IObit. It's true that IObit uses Bitdefender's engine, so you might expect it to earn the same great scores that Bitdefender does. However, AV-Comparatives and the other three make one thing very clear. Their results refer to the specific product tested and say nothing about related or licensed versions. Lab Test Results Chart That's a completely reasonable position. The company licensing the engine might not use it exactly right, or the licensed engine might not be identical to that of the main product. IObit scored quite differently from Bitdefender in some of our own hands-on tests. Looking strictly at lab tests, Kaspersky Anti-Virus is the clear winner. All four labs rate Kaspersky top-notch. We use an algorithm to map lab results on to a scale from 0 to 10 and aggregate them. On that scale, Kaspersky rates a 10. In general, Bitdefender rates right up there with Kaspersky, or very close behind. A recent mishap in a test by SE Labs, going from AAA certification down to B (bypassing AA and A) took Bitdefender down to 9.0 points. Drawing on results from all four labs, Avast, Avira, and ESET also scored 9.0. So-So Malware Protection With no lab reports to go on, our hands-on malware protection tests become more important. For the first test, we start by opening a folder containing the current set of malware samples. Well, usually we open the folder (which resides on the desktop). IObit actually started scanning that folder and eliminating known malware before we even opened it. For individual threats, it popped up a window asking for confirmation to quarantine the threat. The popup also would have let us merely prevent the threat from running, or ignore it, but we always chose quarantine. When multiple warnings happened at once, IObit displayed the number of threats, with an option to view details. We prefer that treatment of multiple threats to the one-threat, one-popup mode used by Sophos Home Premium and a few others. When the dust settled, IObit had eliminated 82 percent of the samples. Next, we launched the remaining samples and noted IObit's reaction. If it did detect malware activity, we used a hand-coded tool to confirm that it fully blocked the malware installation. That confirmation paid off; one sample managed to place numerous malware executables on the test system. IObit detected 89 percent of the samples and scored 8.7 of 10 possible points. Interestingly, the last time we tested an IObit product, using a different set of samples, it detected 89 percent and scored 8.7 points, exactly the same. As for comparing those results with other antivirus products, it's a bit tough, because IObit is the very first product challenged with the current set of samples. However, Norton, Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus, and Emsisoft all detected 100 percent of the previous sample set, and Norton and Webroot scored a perfect 10 points. Malware Protection Results Chart When it comes to the malicious URL blocking test, the sample sets are always the newest, hence always different. We hit every product with the newest malware-hosting URLs available on the day of the test. These URLs come from a daily feed generously supplied by MRG-Effitas, so they're typically no more than 24 hours old. To ensure an accurate result, we keep at this test until we have valid results from 100 or more URLs. If the antivirus steers the browser away from the dangerous URL, we note that behavior. If it kicks in to eliminate the payload during or after the download, it gets equal credit. If the download completes with no reaction from the antivirus, that's a fail. Testing this product a couple years ago, we found that the Surfing Protection component blocked exactly one of the more than 100 samples at the URL level, leaving the real-time antivirus to check the downloaded files. This time around, it didn't block a single URL at the browser level, and only quarantined 61 percent of the downloads. By contrast, Norton managed 98 percent protection, and Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security 97 percent. Clearly, Surfing Protection isn't part of what IObit licenses from Bitdefender (which blocked 91 percent when last tested). Dismal Phishing Protection If a clever hacker sneaks a data-stealing Trojan past your antivirus and snaffles your passwords, well, there isn't much you could have done about that. But if you give away your username and password to a phishing site, that's totally on you. Phishing fraudsters set up sites that accurately mimic banks, email sites, even dating sites. If they fool you into logging in, they own your account. The Surfing Protection component, also present in the standalone tune-up utility, aims to protect you from making a dreadful mistake on a phishing site. When it detects you're about to go where you shouldn't, it replaces the page in the browser with a big, red warning. You can still proceed to the site, if you insist, but you've been warned. Phishing sites are ephemeral, and new phishing techniques appear all the time. Rather than report a hard detection score, we compare each product's detection rate with other forms of phishing protection. Symantec Norton AntiVirus Basic has long been a powerful force against phishing, so we include it in the mix. We also test the phishing protection built into Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. After scraping many suspected fraudulent URLs from websites that collect such things, we power through the list, launching each one in the three browsers and in browsers protected by Norton and by the product under test. If any of them errors out, we discard the URL. If it's not truly a phishing site, we discard it, even if one or more products blocked it. Then, with around 100 data points, we run the numbers. Phishing Protection Results Chart IObit did detect and warn about some of the verified phishing sites, but not many. Its detection rate came in a full 45 percentage points behind Norton. All three of the browsers scored significantly higher than IObit. The lesson is clear; do not turn off your browser's built-in phishing protection. At the other end of the spectrum, Check Point ZoneAlarm PRO Antivirus + Firewall tied with Norton in this test. Trend Micro eked out a 3 percent better detection rate than Norton. And Bitdefender outscored Norton by 12 percentage points. See How We Test Security Software Porous Ransomware Protection Any antivirus should eliminate ransomware threats on sight, just as it eliminates other kinds of malware. However, the consequences of missing a zero-day ransomware attack are much greater than missing a Trojan, bot, or spyware attack. IObit, like many others, adds a separate layer of protection against ransomware. The typical file-encrypting ransomware runs in the background, quietly encrypting your sensitive files, and then displays its ransom note. It doesn't prevent the computer from functioning, since you need computer access to pay the ransom. IObit tries to foil this type of attack by protecting a vast number of document file types against unauthorized access. Bitdefender and Trend Micro fight ransomware by preventing unauthorized modification of files in specified folders. IObit, like Panda Internet Security, blocks unauthorized programs from even reading data from the files it protects, and its protection is system-wide, not limited to any folder. IObit doesn't balk known and trusted programs such as Notepad. When we tried to open files using a hand-coded text editor, IObit popped up a warning, with the option to block or allow access, automatically choosing the block option after 10 seconds. If this happens when you've just started using a new word processor or image editor, simply check the Remember box and click the Allow button to whitelist your new app. For a sanity check, we ran a hand-coded tool that applies simple, reversible XOR encryption to all text files in the Documents folder. IObit correctly detected and prevented this activity. However, setting this program to launch at startup revealed a chink in IObit's armor. When the simple encryptor loaded before IObit's ransomware protection, it could freely encrypt and decrypt files for as long as it remained active. Only when we shut it down and launched it again did IObit detect its activity. To further explore this startup-time problem, we turned off real-time protection, copied a real-world ransomware sample to the test system, and set it to launch at startup. Then we turned real-time protection back on and restarted the test system. The ransomware ran at launch, encrypting documents and displaying its ransom note, with no reaction at all from IObit. That's terrible. Many Better Choices IObit Advanced SystemCare Ultimate licenses an antivirus engine from Bitdefender, but Bitdefender's excellent lab results don't apply, and the labs don't test IObit. In our hands-on phishing protection test, it failed badly. Its new ransomware protection component protects many types of document files from unauthorized access, even read-only access. However, this component completely failed to block ransomware that launched at startup. If you want Bitdefender's antivirus protection along with thorough system tune-up, consider just buying Advanced SystemCare PRO (a one-time cost) and getting antivirus protection directly from Bitdefender. There are many better choices for antivirus protection. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus and Kaspersky Anti-Virus earn great lab scores, and include many bonus features. Tiny, lightweight Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus uses a journal-and-rollback system for unknown programs that can even reverse ransomware damage. Symantec Norton AntiVirus Basic scores high in our hands-on tests, and includes a powerful intrusion prevention component. And McAfee AntiVirus Plus lets you install protection on every device in your household. In the crowded field of antivirus protection, these have all earned the Editors' Choice designation, and any of them is a better choice for you. IObit Advanced SystemCare Ultimate Bottom Line: System tune-up is the best part of IObit Advanced SystemCare Ultimate. With porous ransomware protection and fair-to-poor test scores, the antivirus component just isn't worth your consideration.

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