Total Defense Ultimate Internet Security Review

Deluxe, Premium, Ultimate…it’s not always easy to tell from the name when one security suite outranks another. With Total Defense, the top-tier suite is called Total Defense Ultimate Internet Security. Windows users get a decent antivirus, limited backup, and porous parental control, along with tune-up and vulnerability scans; it’s not bursting with features like some competitors. Its macOS and Android editions, which are licensed from Bitdefender, are much better. In fact, you’re better off going straight to Bitdefender Total Security, our Editors’ Choice winner for full-featured security suites. Norton 360 Deluxe, also an Editors’ Choice, offers double Total Defense’s cloud backup storage and a powerful VPN.

How Much Does Total Defense Cost?

You pay $99.99 per year for 10 Total Defense licenses, which you can use to protect Windows, macOS, or Android devices. That price is the same as what Avast and AVG charge for their suites. A 10-license subscription for the top-tier suite from Bitdefender or Vipre costs $10 more.

Pricing for most competitors goes up from there. For ZoneAlarm, F-Secure Total, or Trend Micro Premium Security, a 10-license pack is just short of $140.

At $149.99 per year, McAfee+ costs just a bit more than those three. Note, though, that a McAfee subscription isn’t limited to 10 licenses. You can use it to install protection on every Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and even ChromeOS device in your household.

It’s Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure Online

A basic subscription for Norton 360 Deluxe has an annual subscription fee of $119.99. That gets you five cross-platform suite licenses, five no-limits VPN licenses, and 50GB of cloud storage for your backups, twice as much as the 25GB you get with Total Defense Ultimate. To protect more devices, you must venture into the realm of Norton 360 With LifeLock, At Norton’s top tier, you get unlimited device licenses a la McAfee and 500GB of backup storage, along with maxed-out LifeLock identity theft protection, all for $349 per year.

A Simple, Attractive Interface

As with other Total Defense offerings, you start your journey by making a purchase or activating a registration code online. Installation is a multi-step process that includes updating malware signatures and running an optimization scan.

With many security lines, the entry-level suite and standalone antivirus have the same look and layout as the top-tier suite. The only difference is that the lower-level apps have some features grayed out or marked with lock icons to show that they’re unavailable.

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That’s not how Total Defense rolls. At the antivirus level, the dark main window features one big panel with a color-coded shield for security status plus a panel apiece for Security and Devices. The entry-level suite shrinks those three panels to make room for two more, Family Protection and Backup.

At the top tier, reviewed here, panels for Performance and Vulnerability round out the layout. In all three cases, the line-art icon for each panel is a different bold color, making for an attractive overall appearance.

Shared Antivirus Features

The standalone Total Defense Essential Anti-Virus, as the name suggests, sticks with the essential features of antivirus protection. It scans for malware on demand, on file access, and on schedule, and its web protection feature diverts your browsers away from dangerous or fraudulent websites. Please read my antivirus review for full details. I’ll briefly recap my findings here.

During every antivirus review, I check to see if test results are available from four independent labs: MRG-Effitas, SE Labs, AV-Comparatives, and AV-Test Institute. When an antivirus gets high scores from multiple labs, that’s a good sign it’s effective.

Total Defense has appeared in reports from various labs over the years, but only AV-Comparatives includes it in recent tests. Of the three tests I follow from this lab, Total Defense received one Advanced+ certification (the best), one Advanced, and one Standard. That’s good, but a half-dozen others reached Advanced+ in all three tests, among them Avast One, Bitdefender, and McAfee+.

I’ve devised an algorithm to map each lab’s scoring system onto a 10-point scale and generate an aggregate score for any antivirus having results from at least two labs. Avast and Norton share the top aggregate score (9.6 of 10 possible points) for those tested by all four labs. Bitdefender, Kaspersky, and McAfee hold perfect scores from the three labs that tested them for an aggregate score of 10 points. Total Defense, with just one lab’s results, doesn’t merit an aggregate score.

With minimal lab scores to go on, my hands-on malware protection tests take on more importance. I start by opening a folder of samples I’ve gathered and analyzed myself and observing how the antivirus reacts. Like many competitors, Total Defense started wiping those out immediately. When the somewhat slow process finished, it had eliminated 69% of the samples, down from 95% when tested with an earlier malware collection.

For the next phase, I launch any surviving samples, so behavior-based and heuristic detection modules get a chance to foil the attack. Total Defense detected some of them based on their behaviors and other clues but still allowed a few to install executable files on the test system. It wound up scoring 78% detection and 7.3 of 10 possible points. That’s a low score, way down from the 9.5 points Total Defense earned when last reviewed. Tested with the same set of samples, Malwarebytes Premium achieved the best score, 9.8 points.

My curated collection of malware samples for testing necessarily remains the same for many months. To test antivirus apps against the very newest threats, I use a feed of the very latest malware-hosting URLs generously supplied by London-based lab MRG-Effitas, Total Defense’s web filter component (which doesn’t require a browser extension) blocked access to 77% of the samples. Real-time antivirus protection eliminated another 20% during or right after download, for a total of 97%. That’s a fine score, though Bitdefender, Guardio, Sophos Home Premium, Trend Micro, and ZoneAlarm all reached 100%.

The web protection system that Total Defense relies on to steer users away from dangerous websites also helps them avoid falling for a phishing scam. In fact, the warning that replaces a phishing page is almost the same as the warning for a malware-hosting site. I did note that the category field often included entries beyond just Phishing, including Spam, Fraud, and Untrusted.

To test phishing protection, I use hundreds of recently reported phishing frauds gathered from websites that track such things. As with the malware-hosting URLs, these are typically just a few days old. Total Defense performed well in this test, detecting 95% of the verified phishing frauds. It outperformed the browser built-ins, but the competition did even better. McAfee, Trend Micro, and ZoneAlarm all reached 100%, as did the Chrome-centric Guardio and fraud-focused Norton Genie.

Shared Suite Features

Naturally, this top-tier suite also shares everything you’d get with the entry-level Total Defense Premium Internet Security suite. It adds the Family Protection parental monitoring system to those features, as well as a simple cloud-based backup component.

There’s not much to say about Family Protection in Total Defense. It filters unwanted content so your kids won’t accidentally (or deliberately) surf to naughty pages. It offers a clunky system for limiting Internet access on a weekly schedule, as well as reports on each child’s activity. Settings are local; this isn’t the modern parental control system where you configure child profiles online and assign devices or accounts to each child.

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Parental protection extends to any app that Total Defense recognizes as a browser. In testing, I found I could elude both the content filter and time scheduler by using a thoroughly off-brand browser, one that I wrote myself. In any case, we at PCMag don’t currently rate or recommend third-party parental control systems, instead advising readers to work with tools built into the various operating systems. If you really want a security suite with full-featured parental control built in, consider Norton.

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As noted, you get 10GB of storage for your cloud backups in Premium, which rises to 25GB in Ultimate. The backup system is straightforward. With very little effort, you can set it to back up your important document files on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule. You can restore files backed up on any Windows or Mac device. But that’s as far as it goes. There’s no option to back up changed files during idle time, and the cloud is the only available destination. For the non-techie user, it’s just fine. For the backup connoisseur, it will seem a bit thin.

As with every suite, I ran some simple tests to measure the suite’s impact on performance. The days of horrific system resource gobbling are over, but different suites still cover a range of different impact levels.

Total Defense slowed the boot process by just 4%, a matter of a second or two. My tests on file system activities and zip/unzip activities came in 6% and 11% longer with the suite installed, for an average of 7% impact across the three tests.

You’re not likely to notice any slowdown from Total Defense. That said, a few competing suites have scored even better in this test. In particular, Avira and Webroot Internet Security Complete didn’t exhibit any slowdown in any of the three tests.

How Good Is the Performance Tune-Up?

You’ve seen that Total Defense won’t slow down your system’s performance, but that’s not all. It may even speed things up. Just click the Performance panel on the main window and click the Scan button on the resulting page.

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On my test system, the performance scan took less than four minutes. It displayed its progress clearly, indicating that it was checking for issues related to Speed, Stability, and Performance. On completion, it displayed a red warning that issues were detected. I viewed the list of 40 found issues but didn’t find it very informative. How should the average user react to an issue listed as “Progids: TTSEngine Class”?

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I returned to the main tune-up window and clicked the Tune-Up button. Annoyingly, this ran the scan all over again but added a Clean indicator after Speed, Stability, and Performance.

When the redundant scan with Clean finished, it reported handling three types of issues. Clicking the report icon revealed it had deleted 33 junk files, checked one drive for fragmentation, and solved 45 Registry issues. The report didn’t offer any details beyond the number of items of each type.

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The initial scan took four minutes, and the repeated scan with cleanup took five. That’s not terribly long, but if you don’t want to spend this long taking care of performance, you can speed things up. Dig into this component’s settings, move the slider from Recommended to Custom, and open Custom Settings. Removing the check next to Scan Before Cleaning eliminates the initial no-action scan. You can also view (and optionally change) the plenitude of areas checked by the Performance scan.

Vulnerability Scan

Microsoft releases patches to improve Windows and other products at least once a month, and many of these relate to security. Other vendors do the same because malware coders are constantly discovering and exploiting new security vulnerabilities. If you fail to install those security patches, you’re leaving the door wide open to exploit attacks. Like Avast, AVG Internet Security, and numerous others, Total Defense Ultimate includes a scanner that identifies and installs missing security patches.

On my test system, the scan ran quickly, taking barely over a minute to report it detected no vulnerable apps.

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When I last evaluated this program, it wasn’t clear just what apps it supported. Now, it’s more like the Software Updater in Avast One, which lists all the apps it tracks. Just click the Apps button to see a list of supported applications, 35 of them at present. These include a half-dozen Adobe offerings, several versions of Microsoft Exchange Server, and popular browsers, as well as some less common items such as Mozilla SeaMonkey and PC Matic.

Bitdefender Protection for Macs

You can use your 10 Total Defense Ultimate licenses to install protection on Windows, macOS, or Android devices. Note, though, that on macOS and Android, you get a rebranded version of Bitdefender’s equivalent apps. Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac is an Editors’ Choice for Mac antivirus, which is a plus. However, your macOS protection is the same whether you choose the standalone antivirus, the entry-level suite, or the top-tier suite reviewed here.

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I’ve reviewed Total Defense Essential Anti-Virus for Mac separately; please refer to that review for full details. I’ll provide a summary here.

The labs that test macOS antivirus don’t include Total Defense, but Bitdefender gets perfect scores from both. Yes, the labs state clearly that their test reports only apply to the precise programs and versions tested, but it seems likely that Total Defense would get similar scores.

(Credit: Total Defense/PCMag)

The macOS edition uses completely different code for phishing and malicious URL detection than the Windows version. At 97% detection, it did a bit better than the Windows edition’s 95% score. Unlike the Windows edition, Total Defense on the Mac marks up dangerous links on search pages and prevents ransomware from changing sensitive files.

Backup for macOS

No matter how carefully you peruse the macOS edition of Total Defense, you won’t find a button or link for backing up your files. And yet, a backup app is available—if you can find it. I needed help from tech support to locate the download. Once you’ve got the app installed on your Mac, you can follow the detailed online instructions to take advantage of it. This feature is also available in Total Defense Premium—I just didn’t see it.

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As in the Windows edition, backup is very simple. At the most basic, you select the files you want to protect, click the Backup Now button, and you’re done. The Windows edition’s built-in backup preselects the main account’s Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos folders. On the Mac, if you don’t actively choose folders for backup, nothing happens. At the very least, you should select your Documents folder.

On either platform, you can schedule a daily, weekly, or monthly backup. The macOS edition adds an hourly backup option, along with the ability to back up every so often, at an interval specified in hours, minutes, or seconds. I’d be happier with an option to use idle time to back up any files that have changed.

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You can recover files from your latest backup or from any backup on any of your devices. Just select the files, select a destination, choose a version (if present), and click Recover. As with backup in the Windows edition, there’s no option to recover a group of files back to their various original locations.

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With up to 10 devices backing up online, you may find that you run out of cloud storage space. The FAQs indicate that you can add 250GB of storage for $159.99 per year or 500GB for $179.99. There’s also a setup fee, $20 at the 250GB level and $40 at 500GB. That’s pricey, considering that Editors’ Choice IDrive charges less than $80 for five terabytes of storage. In addition, IDrive is a comprehensive backup application with features that far outstrip Total Defense.

Total Defense for Android

Total Defense Mobile Security for Android is a licensed edition of its Bitdefender equivalent, which I’ve analyzed in my review of Bitdefender Total Security. This app includes the expected scan for malware, which runs very quickly. It also scans new apps as you install them. In an unusual touch, the malware scanner page links to a list of malware types it detects, among them less common types such as CoinMiner, Banker, and Obfuscated.

As with the Windows edition, Total Defense doesn’t have any direct lab test results on Android. However, the Bitdefender app on which it’s based is a shining star. Along with Avast and Avira, Bitdefender received the highest possible scores in Android-based tests by three labs, AV-Test, AV-Comparatives, and MRG-Effitas. Again, these results don’t reflect testing of the Total Defense app, but they’re suggestive.

The Android app’s anti-theft features include the expected ability to remotely locate, lock, or wipe the device and to make it sound an alarm (handy for finding it around the house). You activate these features from the online Total Defense Central console. Note that this is not the same as the online page where you manage your account and, as far as I can see, there’s no link from that page. You just go directly to central.totaldefense.com.

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If someone finds (or steals) your phone, they’ll probably try to unlock it. By default, Total Defense snaps a photo of whoever’s holding the phone after three failed unlock attempts.

The Account Privacy feature checks your registered email address against lists of addresses exposed in known breaches. It also checks as new breach data comes in. You can add other email accounts for checking if you wish, but you can’t go snooping other people’s email for breaches. The app won’t scan until you enter a confirmation code emailed to the selected address, to prove you own it.

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If someone picks up your Android device before it locks, you could have trouble. App Lock lets you apply additional security for sensitive apps, so a snoop can’t view your messages or place orders online. Having to enter yet another code to get at your important apps can be tedious, though. You can soften the impact of App Lock by permitting a brief exit and return without going through the locking and unlocking process again or by suspending the locking process altogether when your device is on a trusted Wi-Fi network. AVG, McAfee, Panda, and Trend Micro are among the other companies that offer a similar App Lock feature for Android, but none have the flexibility of Total Defense (along with Bitdefender).

A persistent snoop might try to guess the App Lock PIN, but you can set Total Defense to snap a photo of the offender after three failed attempts. As noted, this app will also snapshot a thief who makes three failed unlock attempts. For protection against shoulder surfers watching how you tap your unlock code, you can have the app randomize number positions on the PIN pad.

Once you enable it, Total Defense’s web security steers you away from malicious and fraudulent web pages, displaying the warning “Page is Unsafe.” It can protect Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera, as well as less common browsers like Brave, Dolphin, Huawei Browser, and Samsung Internet.

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Compared to Bitdefender’s Windows suite, which boasts a near-overwhelming set of features, the Bitdefender Android app, while perfectly useful, looks a little underpowered. Total Defense doesn’t offer anything like Bitdefender’s wealth of bonus features on Windows, which means that, by comparison, the equivalent Android app looks better.

Totally Defending Your Devices?

With Total Defense Ultimate Internet Security, Windows users get a suite that’s decent, but not earth-shaking, while those using macOS get the equivalent of Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac, an Editor’s Choice. Android users also get a full-powered Bitdefender equivalent. So you get the best value from this suite if Windows isn’t your main operating system. Better still, just opt for Editors’ Choice winner Bitdefender Total Security instead, which gives you the same excellent macOS and Android protection combined with an award-winning Windows suite. Norton 360 Deluxe, another Editors’ Choice, is also worth consideration, with more cloud storage than Total Defense and a full-powered VPN included.