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The good: Blink Personal is free for personal use; includes vulnerability scanner; many configuration settings; is rules-based.
The bad: Blink Personal is not very user-friendly; is complicated to download and install.
The bottom line: Blink Personal offers more tools than the usual Internet security suite, and it's currently free. However, advanced users will get more out of this suite than beginners who should stick with more user-friendly suites from ZoneAlarm or Norton.
CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 04/09/2007
eEye Digital Security, famous for its discovery of the Code Red worm back in 2001, has done a very responsible thing by porting one of its enterprise tools, Blink, down to the desktop level. And Blink Personal edition is available for free. It will be seen as impressive for advanced users, and a little overwhelming for average users. The Internet security suite provides the basics--antivirus, antispyware, antiphishing, and personal firewall--with more controls for intrusion protection, buffer overflows, system registry protection, and vulnerability assessment. But average users won't want --or ever use--all the configuration options included here. Free or not, casual users are better off with a more user-friendly suite from
ZoneAlarm or
Setup
For the moment, Blink Personal is free for a limited time for personal use, although eEye may continue this offer indefinitely. Blink Professional, designed more for the small business, costs $59 for a single-seat license, with pricing up to one hundred seats available. Blink Personal and Professional both work on Windows 2000 through Windows XP. Windows Vista is not currently supported.
Downloading the suite is a chore. First, you must submit information to receive the actual download link via e-mail. Once downloaded and installed, you must once again submit personal information to register the product. The free Blink Personal will only run on one machine. Addition machines require additional sign-ups. This is similar to the program used by
Should you want to remove Blink Personal, there's no uninstall icon provided. You'll need to use the Windows Control Center Add or Remove Programs. Unlike other programs, Blink asks if you want to remove any configuration information and also the license to use the product. Too many vendors remove the application but leave the license info behind, sometimes fouling installations of competing software. After our program uninstall and a reboot, we found no traces of Blink Personal remaining on our system, including the license information within the system registry that we requested be removed. Of all the suites we reviewed, only ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite 7 completely uninstalled itself.
Interface
To be user friendly, Blink Personal needs to provide a better interface. In porting the tool down from its enterprise version, eEye gives desktop users an inelegant interface similar to any of Microsoft's Sysinternal tools offerings. While Blink Personal follows the Microsoft Windows XP design look and feel--with an expandable navigation panel along the left, and a main window to the right--the Windows-blue coloring and Microsoft-esque icons can be confusing to the casual user. For example, at first glance, Blink Personal appears indistinguishable from the Windows Control Center.
While other security suites offer a system status report up front, alerting users to run updates or scans where necessary, there is none of that here. The closest thing to an overall status report is one produced by the vulnerability assessment tool (see below).
Then there's the naming conventions which might be confusing to some. For example, antiphishing protection is found under Identity Theft Protection. System Firewall is a separate listing from Application Firewall. Some features, like antivirus and antispyware, are simply renamed as Anti-Malware. While these names are technically correct, the average user may struggle to find where they need to go to schedule or run the antivirus protection or an antispyware scan.
Once in the proper section, however, you'll find options to disable the feature, and then, a sometimes-long list of rules or the option to create new rules. Most people won't be creating their own rules lists. While eEye provides the most granular to configure of all the Internet security suites we reviewed this year--a boon for the more advanced and technical users--most of these added features will go unused by the average user.
Features
As stated, Blink Personal goes beyond the usual expectations in an Internet security suite--antivirus, antispyware, a personal firewall--to include more antivulnerablity tools, not surprising since that is eEye's forte.
For antivirus protection, eEye uses three technologies: sandbox, behavioral heuristics, and signature-based protection. The sandbox and signature-based antivirus technologies come from Norman Antivirus; and although the APIs come from Norman, eEye developers built all of the hooking and system-level components themselves. The third level of antivirus protection, the behavioral heuristics, was designed by eEye. The antispyware protection and personal firewalls, both system and application, also were designed by eEye.
Host-based intrusion, buffer overflow, and system registry protection are found in pricier suites offered by major security vendors like McAfee and Symantec, but eEye says its tools go further. Indeed they do, with configuration settings for intrusion protection that might swamp the average user who only wants to know that such protection is available.
The antivulnerability tools are unique to Blink Personal. These include application execution protection, zero-day protection, and vulnerability assessment. The vulnerability assessment tool is perhaps the best feature overall. In an instant, Blink captures information about your system and compares it to the eEye vulnerability lists, providing a detailed report of which Microsoft patches you might be missing, or other work-arounds you should know up front.
Performance
In terms of antivirus protection for your PC, we cite results from two leading independent antivirus testing organizations. In the latest test results from
AV-Comparatives.org, the Norman Antivirus engine used by eEye Blink Personal earned an Advanced (medium-to-high) rating, catching 93 percent of all malware tested. Norman Antivirus was not tested with our second source, CheckVir.com.
CNET did not test the antispyware features, nor the personal firewalls within Blink Personal, and so we did not assign this product a Performance subrating.
Support
Technical support for Blink Personal includes two PDF files, one for an installation guide and the other for user documentation. The latter, a 165-page document, is more than adequate and more thorough than any we've seen provided by the paid Internet-security suite vendors. Online support for Blink Personal is limited to online community forums. The only e-mail support available is for reporting bugs in the program.
Conclusion
Blink Personal is a great security suite for those in the know, with many configurable tools at a price that can't be beat--it's free. But casual users of security software will want more hand-holding and built-in help, so we recommend buying an Internet Security suite that is much more user-friendly.
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- vulnerability assessment,
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User opinions
WRITE YOUR OWN REVIEW How would you rate this product?
-
9/10 Spectacular May 18, 2007
"by hackers to fight hackers" Read more >>
-
8/10 Excellent May 22, 2007
"A great tool for those that are hands-on with security." Read more >>
-
9/10 Spectacular May 13, 2007
"Security of the future, here today" Read more >>
- WRITE YOUR OWN REVIEWSee all 10 user opinions >>
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