ESET Home Security Essential Review

ESET’s security programs have steered away from the traditional trio of antivirus, security suite, and feature-rich mega-suite. Now, you step up from the antivirus to a bundle called ESET Home Security Essential, which contains the familiar security suite and several other independent security apps. Between the suite and the ancillary programs, it really packs in features—some top-notch, others not. If you’re shopping for a feature-packed entry-level security suite, we more highly recommend Bitdefender Internet Security, our Editors’ Choice winner.

What Goes Into ESET Home Security Essential?

In years past, ESET followed the typical pattern, offering an entry-level security suite (ESET Internet Security) and an advanced suite with additional features (ESET Smart Security Premium). These two still exist, but they’re not sold as separate programs. Rather, each forms the core of an ESET Home Security bundle. ESET Home Security Essential, reviewed here, incorporates ESET Internet Security, ESET NOD32 Antivirus, ESET Cyber Security for Mac, ESET Parental Control, and the unusual ESET Smart TV Security (an Android app for smart TVs).

You manage this gaggle of components through the aptly named ESET Home online dashboard. Log in to ESET Home to view all your licenses and protected devices. Right from this dashboard, you can open a license and add protection to the current device or send an email link to install it on another device.

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Shifting to the devices view, you can quickly see if your devices have security issues. You can get details on any problems, but you must go to the affected computer to act on them. There’s no remote configuration control like what you get with Sophos Home Premium, Webroot, and others. The online dashboard is also the spot to manage the parental control and anti-theft components discussed below and the password manager introduced in the next-tier suite.

How Much Does ESET Home Security Essential Cost?

A one-license subscription to this suite costs $49.99 per year. Additional licenses, up to 10, add $5 per year to the subscription price. For example, a three-license subscription runs to $59.99, about $20 less than the three-license price for Trend Micro Internet Security and $25 less than Bitdefender.

It’s Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure Online

Five ESET licenses would cost $69.99 per year, while you pay $119.99 for five Norton licenses. Note that with Norton, you get five licenses for a powerful security suite, five no-limits VPN licenses, and 50GB of online storage for your backups. McAfee+ doesn’t cap the number of devices you can protect. A $149.99 yearly subscription covers every Windows, macOS, Android, ChromeOS, and iOS device in your household. There’s no direct comparison between ESET and McAfee’s no-limits play, but in general, ESET costs a bit less than most of the competition.

Getting Started With ESET Home Security Essential

Installing device-level security suite protection on a PC is a simple matter of logging into ESET Home and downloading the installer for ESET Internet Security. You can also install protection on macOS and Android devices or get an email with an installation link. Clicking the Security features button opens a screen where you can install the anti-theft and parental control components; I’ll discuss those later. This screen also links to components not available in the Essential bundle reviewed here.

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As with the standalone antivirus, ESET Internet Security no longer features the blue-eyed ESET cyborg. The main window looks very much like that of the antivirus. Four large panels represent four security areas: Browser Privacy & Security, Network Inspector, Anti-Theft, and Safe Banking & Browsing. A color-coded banner above reflects the security status of your installation.

The antivirus has three panels below the banner: Update, Scan Your Computer, and Security Report. Those functions are still accessible in the suite; you just reach them through the menu at the left. The menu offers seven options in the antivirus and this suite: Overview, Computer scan, Update, Tools, Setup, Help and Support, and ESET Home account.

Shared Antivirus Features

This suite builds on the antivirus protection found in ESET NOD32 Antivirus. My antivirus review details those features; I hope you’ll read it. Here, I offer a digest of those findings.

ESET participates in tests by two of the four independent labs whose reporting I follow, with mostly excellent scores. Along with Bitdefender Internet Security, it passed both the tough tests administered by MRG-Effitas; the rest of the tested antiviruses failed at least one of them.

Rather than using a numeric scale, the testers at AV-Comparatives certify antivirus tools as Advanced+, Advanced, or Standard, depending on how well they perform. Of the three tests I track, ESET holds one Advanced certification and two at the Advanced+ level. That’s good, but Avast Onev, Bitdefender, McAfee, and several others reached Advanced+ in all three tests.

For comparison purposes, I use an algorithm that maps all the tests to a 10-point scale and derives an aggregate lab score. ESET’s aggregate score of 9.4 points is good, but others do even better. Also tested by two labs, Malwarebytes Premium and AVG Internet Security earned 9.6 and 9.8 points, respectively. In the winners’ circle, Bitdefender and McAfee took a perfect 10 points based on three lab scores.

ESET eschews the quick scan offered by many competitors. Its full scan finished in just under two hours, a bit slower than the current average of 94 minutes. In addition to its unusual UEFI firmware scan, the custom scan option offers a scan of the system Registry and the WMI databases, in each case seeking malware disguised as data and links to infected files.

In my own hands-on malware protection test, ESET detected 84% of the samples, but the fact that quite a few managed to install executable files despite ESET’s detection dragged its overall score down to 7.2 of 10 possible points. That’s one of the lowest scores among apps tested with this sample set. Also tested with the same samples, Malwarebytes scored a near-perfect 9.8 points, with McAfee and Webroot Internet Security Plus next at 9.4 points.

Using a feed of malware-hosting URLs discovered recently by researchers at MRG-Effitas, I checked ESET’s ability to block the latest prevalent malware. It earns a middling 90% protection score, about a third by blocking all access to the dangerous URLs and the rest by eliminating the dangerous downloads. Many competitors managed a perfect 100%, among them Bitdefender, Sophos, and Trend Micro.

The same component that watches for dangerous sites also aims to foil phishing sites—fraudulent pages that imitate secure sites to steal your credentials. ESET detected 93% of the verified frauds, a score that just misses being in the top 10. Five competitors reached a perfect 100% in their latest phishing protection tests, among them McAfee, Trend Micro, and ZoneAlarm.

Other Shared Features

ESET’s Host Intrusion Prevention System (HIPS) aims to prevent attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in your operating system or applications. When I hit it with real exploits generated by the CORE Impact penetration testing tool, ESET actively blocked 34%, identifying most of those by the official name. No exploits breached security, as the test system was fully patched. That 34% score sounds low, but even the most effective security tools didn’t score much over 50% in their latest evaluations.

ESET offers ransomware protection as part of HIPS, but it didn’t prove out in testing. I turned off the real-time antivirus component to see ransomware protection in action and released a dozen real-world malware samples. ESET caught half of them but missed the other half. One of its alleged successes littered the disk with ransom notes and encrypted almost 900 less-important files. Luckily, ESET’s non-ransomware-specific antivirus components eliminated all these samples when I allowed them to act.

Device Control in ESET is probably better suited to a business setting than the home. It puts you in control of a wide variety of device types, including card readers, imaging devices, Bluetooth devices, and more traditional external drives. You could, for example, ban all USB drives but allow exceptions for specific drives or users. Some tech-savvy parents might use Device Control to keep their kids from mounting potentially infected USB drives, but the feature is probably beyond the average user.

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Both the antivirus and the suite have an impressive page of security-related tools, some for your use and some more appropriate for use by a tech support agent. The most important is SysInpector, which snapshots the state of your PC and includes the ability to show what changed from one snapshot to another. Be sure to run SysInspector and save a baseline snapshot in case you (or a tech support agent) need it to diagnose a problem later. To the basic set of tools in the antivirus, the suite adds Network connections and Network Inspector, which I’ll discuss below.

As noted, you can use one of your NOD32 licenses to protect a Mac with ESET Cyber Security for Mac. Naturally, you can also use a suite license for this purpose. In previous years, using a suite license got you the enhanced Pro edition of the Mac antivirus, but that edition no longer exists. Currently, a suite license costs more but doesn’t increase protection on the Mac.

Firewall Remains Annoying

Windows Firewall does a fine job of fending off external attacks and making ports invisible by putting them in stealth mode. A third-party firewall that can’t match the built-in firewall is failing. Fortunately, ESET’s firewall handled those tasks in testing, both defending against web-based attacks and reporting that it had done so.

The main skill third-party firewalls bring to the table is the ability to prevent misuse of your internet connection by controlling network permissions for local programs. Out of the box, ESET doesn’t offer this feature. Its default Automatic mode simply allows all outbound network traffic and blocks unsolicited incoming connections.

To enable program control, you must switch the firewall to Interactive mode. Now, when it detects an unknown program attempting internet or network access, it asks you whether to allow or deny access. And by unknown, I mean any program your installation of ESET hasn’t processed before. There’s no database of known good programs or Windows components.

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You can make your choice a one-off, have it last through the current session, or make it a rule for ESET to remember. One-off is the default, meaning you’ll see this popup repeatedly until you make a rule. Clicking for more details shows the URL and port the app was trying to reach, among other things. Clicking for advanced options lets you fine-tune the rule you want ESET to save. For most users, these details and advanced options will prove incomprehensible.

It gets worse. If you’ve set a password to protect system settings, ESET makes you enter that password after every firewall popup response. Password or not, you’re hit with a User Account Control popup.

Some firewalls, like the one built into ZoneAlarm Extreme Security, use a huge database of known programs, so you hardly ever encounter an unknown. Not ESET. On my test system, immediately after enabling Interactive mode and before doing anything else, I had to go through the whole popup rigmarole nine times.

Those additional steps layered on a seriously old-fashioned firewall popup query system make this the most annoying firewall ever. Norton 360 Deluxe handles security decisions internally, automatically setting permissions for known good programs, wiping out known bad ones, and keeping a sharp eye on unknowns. Kaspersky’s system of trust levels has a similar effect. And, as noted, ZoneAlarm maintains a huge database of known good files, so if it flags a program as unknown, you should pay attention.

A firewall isn’t worth much if malware can turn it off, so I always try disabling protection using techniques available to a malware coder. ESET resisted my every attempt. It doesn’t expose anything in the Registry that would permit turning off protection, and when I tried to terminate its four processes and three Windows services, it snubbed me with an “Access Denied” message.

This firewall handles outside attacks, true, but then Windows Firewall does that. The bonus you get from a third-party firewall is program control, and, out of the box, ESET doesn’t do that. If you enable that feature, you get a terrible torrent of confusing popups. My griping about the firewall’s quirks in review after review may have had an effect—my ESET contact says an update is due later this year.

Before I move on to other features, I should mention the Intrusion Detection System (IDS). IDS is often a feature of standalone firewalls. This component analyzes network traffic to protect against attacks across the network. ESET’s basic antivirus has HIPS but not IDS, so I repeated the exploit protection test. The results were unchanged, with no action at all from the IDS.

One-Trick Parental Control for Windows

Parental control system features cover a wide range these days. Filtering out inappropriate content is a core feature, often accompanied by screen-time limits or scheduling. Some parental control systems monitor social media and chat, letting parents see or control their child’s contacts. Others track the child’s location via smartphone or even define geofences such that parents get a notification when the child crosses a line. You’ll find apps that enforce age limits on games the child uses, lock Safe Search to the ON position, require regular breaks from screen time, and more.

On Windows, out of these possibilities, ESET only applies content filtering. You control a separate Android-specific parental app (which I’ll discuss below) from the ESET Home dashboard. As for macOS or iOS, parental control is simply absent.

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ESET doesn’t enable parental control automatically since many users don’t need it. When you do turn it on, you must define a password to protect your settings. You now need a password for every settings change, including (as noted earlier) every response to a firewall popup. You also must identify every Windows user account as belonging to a parent or a child and enter the birthdate for child accounts.

Based on the birthdate, ESET pre-configures which of its three dozen content categories to block. Parents can fine-tune the category selection, a task made slightly awkward by the fact that you can only see seven of the categories at a time in the small scrolling window. Many similar systems make you put an X next to categories that should be blocked. ESET swings the other way; everything is blocked except for categories that you’ve OK’ed with a checkmark.

When I switched to a child account for testing, the content filter blocked many inappropriate sites, even sites merely selling women’s lingerie. However, it missed quite a few, including some with truly raunchy porn videos.

(Credit: ESET/PCMag)

With help from its browser extension, ESET correctly displayed its site-block warning for secure HTTPS sites. An off-brand browser simply displayed an error for blocked HTTPS pages, while ESET slid in a popup explaining why the page didn’t display. Since ESET handles HTTPS sites, your too-clever teen won’t slip past the filter by using a secure anonymizing proxy.

Back in the parent account, I checked the logs and found nothing. I had to go back into settings and change the Logging severity from Diagnostic to Information. After that, ESET logged all blocked websites with a date/time stamp, the user account involved, and the content category that set off the filter.

That’s it for parental control on Windows. You don’t get any of the fancy features I mentioned above, and you must configure protection separately for every Windows ESET installation.

Separate Parental Control for Android

Modern parental control utilities need to work across multiple devices and multiple platforms. ESET’s legacy parental feature fails there, with support for Windows only and settings local to each Windows device. The new parental control system managed through ESET Home can apply its settings across multiple devices, but only Android devices.

From the ESET Home dashboard, you create a profile for each child, associate that child’s devices, and set up rules. Web Guard rules let you block access to the same set of categories used by the Windows app. Like the Windows app, the content filter missed some raunchy pages. Unlike the Windows app, it worked only with major browsers. I determined that by switching to Brave or another less-known browser, your child could evade parental content filtering.

(Credit: ESET/PCMag)

Going beyond what’s offered under Windows, the Android app’s Application Guard system offers detailed control of just which apps your kid can use and when. ESET automatically configures what’s allowed based on your child’s age. You can also manually select from five age ranges:

In addition to marking a given app as allowed or blocked, you can apply time limits in two ways. First, you can set a Time budget, meaning the maximum time allowed on school days and on non-school days. Second, you can use a convenient weekly grid to define a schedule for access to time-limited apps. The Battery Protector feature, enabled by default, blocks time-limited apps any time the device’s battery dips below a certain level, 20% by default.

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The page that appears when ESET blocks a site or an app includes an option for the child to request an exception. Such requests appear at the top of the Home page for the child’s profile, and you can allow or ignore each request with a quick click. The Home page also includes a summary of site and app usage, a full activity log, and a map of your child’s location. You can click a link to go from any of the summaries to a page with full reporting of website and app activity.

From the child’s point of view, the ESET app reports on screen time used and offers a view of the rules, much like the House Rules page in Norton Family. Naturally, it also shows itself when blocking access to a website or app.

(Credit: ESET/PCMag)

Parental control on Android goes beyond what ESET offers on Windows, adding application management and child location. It’s also a cross-device system, though not cross-platform like the best parental control utilities. In any case, our current position is that you’re better off sticking with the parental control features in popular operating systems rather than opting for a third-party solution.

Spam and Email Protection

Chances are good that your incoming email stream gets junk mail and spam filtered out before you ever see it. That’s the standard these days. If you’re one of the few still needing a local spam filter, ESET is up to the job and checks for malware in your email. Many antispam tools limit filtering to POP3 mail; ESET also handles IMAP accounts.

ESET used to integrate with various Microsoft-provided email services, but all of those except Outlook have fallen by the wayside. If you do use Outlook, you can integrate ESET’s spam protection directly. If you moved on to an email client like Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird, or The Bat!, you’ll need to define message rules to send spam and infected messages into the appropriate folder.

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You have full control over the spam filter’s configuration, from fine-tuning the ports used for different protocols to adjusting the parameters of ESET’s ThreatSense detection system. If you’re smart, you won’t exercise this control, as the system’s default settings offer optimal protection.

The one area you may want to tweak is the whitelist/blacklist system. ESET automatically whitelists addresses found in your contacts, people you send messages to, and senders of messages you actively classify as not spam. You can add to this list to make sure you never miss valid messages, or you can add to the blacklist to block all mail from certain addresses or domains.

Once again, most people don’t need this component, but if you require a local spam filter, ESET can take care of the task for you.

Network Inspector

An antivirus or security suite can protect your Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS devices, but what about your connected doorbell, online security camera, or smart toaster? There’s no way to install security on these, but ESET at least helps you track down what’s connected to your home network and flag devices with security problems.

The Network Inspector displays your devices in a kind of network map. Devices appear as icons in concentric rings, with your computer and router in the center. The most recently detected devices appear in the innermost ring—when you’ve just started, everything will be in that ring. Devices that haven’t connected for a while migrate to the outer rings. You only see six or seven devices at a time in the inner ring. To see more, you click on arrows that spin the view.

The display names each device that provides name information. It also attempts to identify the device as one of a dozen types, among them TV, NAS, and game console. Digging into details for an unknown device, you get the IP address, MAC address, and (if available) manufacturer’s name. Network experts who can identify an unknown device based on this data are free to give it a friendly name and select a device type.

(Credit: ESET/PCMag)

The ring display is attractive, but I prefer the option to view your devices in list form. ESET initially found 18 devices on my network, including both wired and wireless connections, and more appeared during my testing. It pops up a notification when new devices connect, potentially alerting you to unauthorized connections.

If the network inspector identifies network services used by a device or if the firewall has blocked any traffic from the device, that device gets flagged with a circled-i information icon. In the device’s detail report, you can see what services are used and what traffic was blocked, but unless you’re a network expert, there’s no point. You might think the link titled “Disconnecting the device” would give you a way to cut off an intruder, but actually, it just opens the router’s interface. Figuring out how to disable the offender using that interface is a DIY task, one best left to experts.

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Where appropriate, the detail report includes a button to open the device’s network interface. For example, it provided quick access to my router’s configuration page and to my network-aware printer’s embedded web server.

Avast includes a similar scanner, and anybody can download and use the free Bitdefender Home Scanner or Avira Home Guard. However, ESET’s Network Inspector scanner stands above the pack with its clear information and effective access to useful settings.

Unusual Anti-Theft System

For those oh-so-portable Android phones, loss or theft may be more of a security threat than infestation by malware. For Windows desktop computers, which are typically tied to power, network, and peripherals by a snarl of cables, not so much. However, laptops are so powerful these days that they can replace almost any desktop, and a laptop is easily lost or stolen. Even so, not many security suites offer anti-theft other than for mobile devices. Bitdefender Total Security is among the very few that can locate, lock, or wipe a stolen Windows laptop. ESET won’t remotely wipe a stolen device, but it can locate it, lock it down, and snap screenshots and webcam pictures of the thief.

When you first enable anti-theft, ESET checks your system for any required optimization steps. If you’ve configured the laptop to log in automatically without a password, well, that’s a bad idea. ESET remotely restores the password requirement. In addition, it creates what it calls a phantom account. When it locks your system, nothing is visible but that phantom account. The thief can’t access other accounts or their files.

You manage anti-theft for your devices from the ESET home dashboard. If you didn’t complete the optimization steps for any device, you’ll get a warning here. You can click a button to mark the device as missing or click for a simple test of the anti-theft system. The test creates a report including a snapshot of the screen, a picture from the webcam (if present), and the device’s location (when possible).

Marking a device as missing doesn’t have an instantaneous effect; ESET checks in every 10 minutes. When it sees that you’ve flagged the device as missing, it reboots and logs in to the phantom account. It starts collecting the device’s location and snapping screenshots. And it keeps doing this for two weeks. If you suspect the device is merely lost, you can send a message to the finder.

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I marked my virtual machine test system and a physical PC as missing. Within a minute, both rebooted into the phantom account. I tried to switch away from the phantom account, but the other Windows accounts didn’t show up. And when I tried to open folders belonging to those accounts, Windows wouldn’t let me, not without an Administrator password (something the thief wouldn’t have).

On both systems, Windows went through the usual setup steps for a new user account after rebooting. ESET doesn’t mention this, but I suggest you log into the phantom account at least once and get those steps out of the way.

As noted, you can send a message to a missing computer on the chance that a helpful person has found it. The message appeared quickly on both the physical and virtual test systems.

Every ten minutes, ESET snapped a screenshot that I could view in the online console. Had the test systems been equipped with webcams, they would have also snapped pictures of whoever was in front of the device.

ESET analyzes Wi-Fi signals to determine the device’s location. My virtual machine test system has a wired connection, so no location data was available. However, ESET precisely located the physical test system, which has Wi-Fi.

To wrap up the test, I marked both devices as recovered. The virtual machine quickly unlocked and rebooted to the login screen. As for the physical test system, initially, I got an odd error message with a big sad-face emoji. That problem self-corrected overnight.

Clearly, anti-theft protection is most useful on a laptop. A portable device is more likely to go missing than a desktop PC tethered by its wires and cables. If you install ESET on a laptop, be sure to go through the optimization steps. Once you’ve done so, log into the phantom user account once to get past those introductory screens from Windows. Now, if your laptop goes walkabout, you’re prepared.

Safe Banking and Browsing

You can access any of ESET’s features from the left-rail menu, but four features also get a big, prominent button panel, among them Safe Banking & Browsing. Clicking this panel launches a hardened version of your default browser. You’ll know it’s active, as it gives the browser a glowing border and an ESET tab along the edge that expands into an explainer. This feature supports Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. If your default browser isn’t one of these, ESET tries to launch Internet Explorer, and Windows redirects that attempt to Edge. Given that IE reached its end of life in 2022, you’d think ESET would go directly to Edge.

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The similar Safe Money feature in Kaspersky and SafePay in Bitdefender Internet Security both activate whenever you visit a known financial site, offering to switch from the unsecured browser to a protected one. I couldn’t find a banking site that triggered such an offer from ESET, but you can add any site manually to a list of sites that always use the secure browser. Rather than use a browser with a glowing border, Bitdefender displays it on an entirely separate desktop. Banking protection in G Data Internet Security is invisible unless you encounter a problem such as a man-in-the-middle attack.

Some security suites discourage using their secure browsing systems when you’re not performing sensitive transactions online. With ESET, it’s quite the opposite. By flipping a switch called Secure all browsers, you tell ESET to always use the secure banking mode in supported browsers.

Webcam Protection

Do you ever leave your laptop turned on while you’re getting ready for bed? How would you feel about some pervy peeper viewing or even recording you while you’re slipping into your Hello Kitty PJs? Creepy, right? But malware exists that permits remote control of your webcam without giving away its presence by turning on the tell-tale activity light. ESET joins the fight against spyware with an extension of Device Control that keeps untrusted programs from using the webcam.

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Turned on by default, this feature pops up a notification when any app tries to use your webcam. If you were just setting up a video chat, tell it to allow your video application. But if the request is unexpected, block the app and launch a malware scan. Bitdefender, Sophos, and Trend Micro (among others) offer very similar features.

Small Performance Hit

Years ago, security suites had a deserved reputation for hogging memory and other system resources, and that was a serious problem. When users turn off protection because it bogs down performance, security takes a nosedive. Security companies know they must avoid slowing performance. I didn’t notice any slowdown after installing ESET on my test systems, but I ran a few hands-on evaluations to get a clearer look.

My boot-time test reboots the system and launches a script that checks CPU usage once per second. After 10 seconds in a row with no more than 5% CPU usage, I deem the system ready for use. Subtracting the start time of the boot process (as reported by Windows) yields a measure of boot time. I average many runs with no security suite, install the suite, and then average many runs again. I do the same with a script that moves and copies a big collection of files between drives and another script that zips and unzips the same file collection repeatedly. Comparing the before and after averages lets me see how much the suite slows things down.

The last time I tested ESET’s suite, it had little or no effect on these tests. This time around, its impact remained low, but not quite as low. Boot time increased by 5%, hardly noticeable when the baseline time is less than 10 seconds. The file copy and zip/unzip tests took 10% and 2% longer, respectively. ESET’s overall average impact of 6% is nothing to worry about. Even so, Avira Prime and Webroot retain their zero-impact scores in all three tests.

Comprehensive Protection for Android Devices

ESET offers free Android antivirus protection, but what you get is quite limited. You must use one of your licenses to get the full-powered Premium edition. I sent an email from the ESET Home portal with an installation link to the Pixel 6 that I use for testing. I activated the installation with one of my licenses and thereby gained access to all the Premium features. An informational screen pointed out that one ESET Home license protects up to five Android devices connected to the same Google account.

Good Lab Scores

Three of the four testing labs I follow now test Android security apps, and all three include ESET in their latest reports. Tested under Windows, ESET earns some perfect scores and some good scores. Its Android scores likewise range from good to perfect.

AV-Test Institute rates Android apps using the same Protection, Performance, and Usability criteria as it does under Windows. In the latest Android-centric report from this lab, ESET achieved 17.5 of 18 possible points, enough to earn it the title Top Product. That’s good, but more than three-quarters of tested apps turned in a perfect 18.

In its latest report, AV-Comparatives rated ESET’s protective abilities at 100%. But then, it gave all the apps I follow the same rating. As for MRG-Effitas, almost all the tested security apps also reached 100%. ESET came in just a bit behind with 98.6%.

I don’t yet have an aggregate scoring system for Android lab tests. However, with perfect scores and near-perfect scores, it’s clear that ESET is a winner.

Getting Started on Android

As noted, ESET’s cyborg mascot no longer graces the Windows and macOS security utilities. However, those blue eyes still gaze serenely from the Android app. As usual, the app requested various permissions to carry out its mission. On completion of the installation, it launched a quick scan. It suggested strengthening protection by enabling six components: Anti-Theft, Payment Protection, App Lock, Anti-Phishing, Scheduled Scan, and Call Filter. Naturally, turning on these components required even more permissions. For example, App Lock needed access to usage data. Anti-Theft needed location and camera data as well as Device Administrator permission.

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Like similar features in Bitdefender Total Security, Kaspersky, McAfee, and others, App Lock lets you put sensitive apps behind the protection of a secondary PIN. Now, even a nosy friend who picks up your unlocked phone won’t be able to peek at your emails or texts. Bitdefender takes this feature a step further, with options such as quickly leaving and returning to an app without needing a PIN or suppressing App Lock when you’re on a trusted Wi-Fi network.

Anti-Theft for Android

As with the Windows-based anti-theft system, full activation of anti-theft features may require one or more optimization steps. From the ESET Home web portal, you can mark the device as missing, thereby locking it down and regularly checking its location. You can also remotely wipe the device. If you suspect the Android is somewhere nearby, you can trigger a loud siren.

In addition to the usual remote locate, lock, and wipe functions, ESET’s anti-theft can lock the device on removal of the SIM card. Several competitors, Webroot among them, offer SIM locks. Given that the Android device I use for testing isn’t provisioned for cellular data, I can’t test this feature.

You can also enable Anti-Phishing, which protects Chrome, Firefox, and other apps like Facebook and Instagram. I tested it using the AMTSO Features Check page and found that, indeed, it displayed the proper warning. Bitdefender, Kaspersky, and Webroot are among the other Android security apps that aim to fend off phishing frauds.

(Credit: ESET/PCMag)

Once you’ve responded to all the recommendations, the recommendations window vanishes. At this point, the app bears a certain resemblance to its Windows counterpart. It uses the same white background with blue buttons and the same status banner, complete with ESET’s cyborg mascot. Large buttons appear in three groups: Security, Privacy, and Device. Under Security, you find a large button summarizing the Security Report, with buttons for Antivirus, Anti-Phishing, Payment Protection, and Network Inspector below. The Privacy group contains Anti-Theft and App Lock. In the Device group are Call Filter and Security Audit, along with a summary of recent activity.

Useful Security Features

In the Windows edition, Payment Protection launches an instance of your default browser that’s protected against interference. On Android, you’re as likely to use an app as a browser—who logs onto Amazon.com from an Android browser? To configure Payment Protection, you simply identify the apps that you want protected under the aegis of the Safe Launcher.

Network Inspector works just like its Windows equivalent, though the display can be a bit cramped on an Android phone. Tap to scan the network, then see connected devices either in a series of rings or as a simple list.

(Credit: ESET/PCMag)

Enabling the Call Filter component requires access to calls and contacts, along with notification privileges. As expected, this feature lets you filter out calls from unwanted callers. There’s a handy button to block the most recent caller. You can block calls from specific types, such as hidden numbers, or from all numbers not in your contacts. Given that my Android testbed isn’t provisioned for calling, I couldn’t actively test this feature.

Much like the privacy audit feature in McAfee and Webroot, ESET’s Security Audit lists applications that have potentially risky permissions. For example, it flags apps that access your contacts or track your location. Take a moment to review these. When you tap the icon for each type of permission, you get a list and clear the notification of newfound apps. When you review the audit later, you’ll see notification numbers only if there are new apps involved.

Android protection in Norton 360 Deluxe takes the app-review concept to the next level, reporting on apps in the App Store before you even download them. Trend Micro reviews your apps based on the resources they use rather than on permissions.

(Credit: ESET/PCMag)

Security Audit also checks your Android device’s settings, looking out for any that may not be configured correctly. For example, it warns if you’ve rooted the device or if you have USB debugging enabled.

Payment Protection, Network Inspector, and Call Filter are relatively new to the Android app. All three are welcome additions that serve to make ESET’s offering a more powerful Android security utility. It includes all the expected antivirus and anti-theft capabilities, as well as app lock, security audit, and more.

An Uneven Bundle of Security

ESET Home Security Essential combines ESET’s antivirus protection with all the expected suite features. It also includes some unusual components such as anti-theft for laptops, a network security scanner, and webcam security. However, some core components, such as the firewall, failed to impress in our testing. Moreover, these components haven’t improved over the past several years. If you want an entry-level security suite, consider Editors’ Choice winner Bitdefender Internet Security. It’s even more feature-packed than ESET, and its lab scores are exemplary.