Many security companies offer protection at three levels: a standalone antivirus product; an entry-level security suite with features such as firewall, spam filtering, or VPN; and a top-tier suite containing every imaginable feature. Names that distinguish basic from advanced suites are important, and words like “Total” or “Deluxe” or “Premium” don’t always help. However, using “Ultimate” in the name clearly identifies a top-tier suite. Indeed, Total Defense Ultimate Internet Security is at the pinnacle of this company's product line. It offers additional features for Windows, along with very good security for Android and macOS devices.
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 Bitdefender, BullGuard Premium Protection, and Vipre charge for their suites. A 10-license subscription for the top-tier suite from Avast or AVG costs $10 less, but most competitors ask for more. A 10-license subscription for Trend Micro or ESET will set you back almost $140 per year, and Panda Dome Premium goes for $275. You pay $159.99 for McAfee Total Protection, but that gets you licenses for every Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS device in your household. Not only is Total Defense less expensive than most, but it also comes with 25GB of storage for your online backups.
Like Norton and Trend Micro, Total Defense offers a fixed number of licenses at each product tier. If you want Ultimate, the top Total Defense tier, you get 10 licenses. To get 10 Norton licenses, you must choose Norton 360 with LifeLock Advantage, the middle tier of Norton’s LifeLock-equipped suites. You pay almost $250 at this level, but you do get 10 cross-platform suite licenses, 10 no-limits VPN licenses, 250GB of backup storage, and enhanced LifeLock identity protection.
Simple, Attractive Interface
With many security product lines, the entry-level suite and standalone antivirus have the same look and layout as the top-tier all-features suite. The only difference is that the lower-level products have some features grayed out or marked with icons to show that they’re locked.
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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 color, making for an attractive overall appearance.
Features Shared With Antivirus
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(Opens in a new window). When product that gets high scores from multiple labs, that's a good sign that it's effective. Total Defense has appeared in various lab reports over the years, but only AV-Comparatives includes it in the most recent tests. Of three tests I follow from this lab, Total Defense received Advanced+ (the best certification) in two. That’s good, but Avast One, AVG, Bitdefender, and McAfee earned Advanced+ in all three tests.
I’ve devised an algorithm to map each lab’s scoring system onto a 10-point scale and generate an aggregate score for any product having results from at least two labs. With an aggregate score of 9.9, Kaspersky Security Cloud tops the products tested by all four labs. Only three labs included AVG in their latest tests, but it aced them all, for a perfect 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 that I've gathered and analyzed myself and observing how the antivirus reacts. Like many products, Total Defense started wiping those out immediately. When the somewhat slow process finished, it had eliminated 95% of the samples.
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 didn’t detect anything new in this phase, but it still came out with a very good 9.5 points overall. Tested with the same samples, Norton achieved a near-perfect score of 9.9, while McAfee and Webroot SecureAnywhere Internet Security Complete managed 9.7.
My curated collection of malware samples for testing remains the same for many months. To test antivirus products against the very newest threats I use a feed of malware-hosting URLs generously supplied by London-based lab MRG-Effitas(Opens in a new window), Total Defense’s web filter component (which doesn’t require a browser extension) blocked access to 83% of the samples. Real-time antivirus protection eliminated another 15% during or right after download, for a total of 98%. That’s a fine score, though McAfee Total Protection, Norton, and Sophos achieved 100% in this test.
The web protection that helps Total Defense steer users away from dangerous websites also serves to help 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. The main difference is the category field, which lists one or more clasifications such as Spam, Fraud, or Phishing.
To test phishing protection, I use hundreds of recently reported phishing frauds from websites that track such things. As with the malware-hosting URLs, these are typically just a few days old. Total Defense performed very well in this test, detecting 98% of the verified phishing frauds. That puts it in the winners’ circle, though a few have done even better. Avast and Webroot eked out 99%, while Bitdefender, F-Secure Safe, McAfee, and Norton all scored 100%.
Shared Suite Features
Naturally this top-tier suite also shares everything you’d get with the entry-level Total Defense Premium Internet Security suite. Specifically, it includes the Family Protection parental monitoring system and 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. And you can view reports on each child's activity. Settings are local; this isn't the modern parental control system where you configure profiles online and assign devices.
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. That’s an improvement over the version previously reviewed, in which a clever youth could evade content filtering using a secure anonymizing proxy and defeat the scheduler by changing the system time, but it’s still not great. If you need a security suite with a full-featured parental control system, consider Kaspersky or Norton instead.
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. But that's as far as it goes. There's no option to back up changed files during idle time, it doesn't keep multiple versions of backed-up files, 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 product'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 turned in a substantially better set of scores than when last tested. It didn’t slow the boot process at all, and my tests on file system activities and zip/unzip activities came in 6% and 8% longer with the suite installed, for an average of 5% across the three tests.
You’re not likely to notice any slowdown from Total Defense. That said, a few products have scored even better in this test. In particular, K7 Ultimate Security and Webroot didn’t slow any of the three tests at all.
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 for you. Just click the Performance panel on the main window and click the Scan button on the resulting page.
On my test system, the performance scan took less than five minutes. It displayed its progress clearly, indicating that it was checking for issues related to Speed, Stability, and Performance. I was mildly disappointed that it found only one issue to fix, but I clicked the Tune-Up button regardless. Doing so restarted the scan, but added a Clean indicator after Speed, Stability and Performance.
When the redundant scan with Clean finished, it reported handling three issues, not one. Clicking the report icon revealed that it deleted 19 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.
The initial scan took five minutes, and the repeated scan with cleanup took almost seven. That’s not terribly long, but if you don't want to spend double time 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 non-action scan. Here, too, you can 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 turning up 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 less than a minute. It reported that Firefox needed patching, but Chrome was fully up to date. I clicked Update and discovered that, as with Performance, I had to run the scan all over again. Also as with the Performance feature, there’s a setting to turn off Scan before Cleaning.
It’s not clear just what apps Total Defense checks. A repeat scan after the initial scan and update reported zero apps vulnerable and zero apps up to date. I prefer the style of the Software Updater in Avast One, which lists all the apps it tracks, both out of date and up to date.
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, so this is a good deal.
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 products tested, but I imagine Total Defense would get similar scores.
Even though the macOS edition uses completely different code for phishing and malicious URL detection than the Windows version, both scored an excellent 98% in my hands-on tests. Unlike the Windows edition, Total Defense on the Mac marks up dangerous links on search pages and prevents ransomware from changing sensitive files. And it did a very good job of detecting and eliminating Windows-centered malware.
Backup on 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 to you, 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(Opens in a new window) to take advantage of it.
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. On either platform you can schedule a daily, weekly, or monthly backup. The macOS edition adds an hourly backup option.
You can recover files from your latest backup or from any backup on any of your devices. Just select the files, select a destination, and click Recover. As under Windows, there’s not an option to recover a group of files back to their various original locations.
With up to 10 devices backing up online, you may find that you run out of cloud storage space. If that happens, Total Defense offers two options: trim your backup sets to free up space or purchase additional cloud storage. These options only appear when you’ve run out of space, so I couldn’t give them a hands-on evaluation.
The FAQs indicate that you can add 250GB of storage for $159.99 per year or 500GB for $20 more. 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.
Defend Your Android
Total Defense Mobile Security for Android is a licensed edition of its Bitdefender equivalent, which I've described 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 displays a list of malware types it detects, among them less common types such as CoinMiner, Banker, and Obfuscated. You can tap any item for an explanation.
As with the Windows product, Total Defense doesn’t have any direct lab test results on Android. However, the Bitdefender product on which it’s based is a shining star. Along with Avira, Bitdefender received the highest possible scores in Android-based tests by AV-Test, AV-Comparatives(Opens in a new window), and MRG-Effitas. Again, these results don’t reflect testing of the Total Defense product, but they’re suggestive.
The Android product’s antitheft 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.
If someone finds (or steals) your phone, they may try to unlock it. By default, Total Defense snaps a photo of whoever’s holding the phone after three failed unlock attempts.
The Privacy feature checks your registered email addresses you enter against lists from 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.
If someone picks up your Android device before it locks, you could have trouble. App Lock lets you apply additional security 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 unlocking again, or by suspending the lock process 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 come with the same flexibility that Total Defense (along with Bitdefender) does.
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 feature will also snapshot a thief who makes three failed unlock attempts.
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.
Compared to Bitdefender's Windows suite, which boasts a near-overwhelming set of features, the 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.
Total Defense for Your Devices
Total Defense Ultimate Internet Security is a bit of a conundrum. In most cross-platform suites, the Windows edition tends to dominate, with features and technology beyond the other platforms. Android typically comes next, with a full suite of protective features. The macOS edition often gets short shrift, perhaps just an antivirus where Windows users got a suite. But with Total Defense, 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. You get the best value from this suite if Windows isn't your main operating system.
If your aim is to protect a houseful of devices, including multiple operating systems, you’re probably better off with McAfee Total Protection. Yes, at the unlimited license level it costs a good bit more than Total Defense, but it really is unlimited. If it’s powerful cross-platform protection you want, not necessarily the maximum number of devices, look to Norton 360 Deluxe. Your Norton subscription includes a no-limits VPN and 50GB of online backup storage, as well as comprehensive security. Norton is an Editors’ Choice for cross-platform multi-device security.
Total Defense Ultimate Internet Security offers excellent protection (licensed from Bitdefender) for macOS and Android devices, along with decent protection for Windows devices.
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