Firewall protection

As we mentioned earlier in this review, BullGuard Premium Protection does not automatically disable the Windows Firewall, because it relies on it. We did not expect to see that, knowing that in the past, this security suite used to offer its own firewall module. The company says that their firewall implementation builds on the low-level features offered by Windows Firewall, so the network protection you get from BullGuard Premium Protection should be superior to the built-in Windows protection. Is that true? Let's see what our tests have revealed:

We used two of the best network vulnerabilities scanners available: Nessus and Nmap. The tests we ran with these scanners were made on a Public network profile and repeated on a Private network profile. When we used a Private profile, Nmap found one open port and Nessus found four. When we switched to a Public profile, neither Nessus nor Nmap managed to find any open ports on our test computer, and none of them could offer any meaningful information about it. The only information that slipped through was the MAC address of our test computer. This is not important from a security perspective.

Although BullGuard Premium Protection does not offer its own firewall and uses Windows Firewall, the enhancements it adds are efficient.

Antivirus and antispyware protection

The first thing we checked regarding antivirus protection is how efficient BullGuard Premium Protection is at blocking malicious websites. This security suite does that by scanning and filtering all the HTTP traffic that goes on your computer. That translates into you being protected regardless of the web browser that you prefer using. To test its efficiency, we used the most common web browsers today - Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera - and tried to load several malicious websites. However, the antivirus' Safe browsing tool is efficient, so we could not visit any known infected website because BullGuard Premium Protection always stopped us. This is an excellent result.

The next thing we checked regarding antivirus protection was to see how BullGuard Premium Protection handles removable drives with malware samples on them. To do that, we placed a series of viruses on a USB memory stick, which we plugged into our test computer. BullGuard Premium Protection immediately started scanning our memory stick and, after a few moments, detected the infected files we had on it. This is another excellent behavior, which we would like to see in more security products.

Then, we took our test computer, we made a clean Windows 10 installation on it and infected it with lots of viruses, including some new ransomware. Afterwards, we asked BullGuard Premium Protection to download and install itself and then clean the infected computer. Everything worked well, and the security suite immediately started a quick antivirus scan, after it was up and running, and immediately began detecting and removing some of the infected files on our system. After the real-time engine stopped identifying malware, we also ran a full system scan, and BullGuard Premium Protection managed to remove all the remaining viruses from our computer, which is excellent.

Another critical aspect regarding antivirus quality is how fast it is at scanning your computer. Fortunately, the antivirus engine offered by BullGuard Premium Protection is a fast one. It needed about 4 minutes on average, to do a complete scan of our Windows 10 system partition which had a size of 126GB and 35GB of files stored on it.

To get a second opinion about the antivirus engine that powers BullGuard Premium Protection, we also checked what other independent security organizations had to say about it:

• AV-Test rated BullGuard Internet Security with a score of 5.5 points out of 6 for protection and performance, and 5 out of 6 for usability.
• AV-Comparatives awarded BullGuard with the top Advanced+ badge in their Performance and Malware Protection tests, and with their Advanced badge in the "Real World" Protection test.
• Virus Bulletin awarded BullGuard Antivirus with their VB100 badge and measured a proactive detection rate of 62.31% and a reactive detection rate of 93.65 on Windows 7.

BullGuard Premium Protection offers an excellent antivirus engine that can handle any threat, be it online or offline. It did well in all our tests, so we cannot point any negative aspects.

Extra features

BullGuard Premium Protection packs more than a few additional features that may or may not be useful to its customers:

• Backup - lets you schedule backups of your files and drives and save them on local or network drives, as well as on the three most common cloud storage spaces today: Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.
• Vulnerabilities - searches for and fixes Windows vulnerabilities such as system updates configuration issues or missing security updates, opened ports, insecure wireless settings, and so on.
• Game Booster - a tool designed to create a better experience for gamers. According to the company, when Game Booster is enabled, "any apps running while you are playing will be running isolated on a single CPU core, while the rest of the CPU cores will be allocated towards the game for a better gaming experience."
• PC Tune Up - scans your computer for performance issues and helps you fix them. It can clean temporary system files, browser cache files, defragment registry and so on, all automatically, in the background.
• Parental Control - lets you filter the websites your child is allowed to visit, select at which time during the week your child can access the internet or use the computer, and it also lets you specify which apps are blocked. It is an easy to use Parental Control tool that every parent will appreciate.
• Home Network Scanner - is a tool that can identify new network connections, monitor new devices which try to connect to your networks, and offer you an overview of all current and or previously connected devices. It can also tell you which of those devices might expose your network to external threats.

BullGuard Premium Protection bundles quite a few additional features, and some of them will be useful to its customers. We especially liked the Parental Controls module. If there's one thing missing here, is VPN plan that would be able to protect users when using public, unsecured WiFi networks.

Default settings that you might want to adjust

BullGuard Premium Protection is a security suite that is well configured. As such, there are only a few recommendations we can make regarding the default settings that you might want to adjust:

• Minimize notifications - if you want the security suite to display fewer notifications, you can tune its Notification level and "Minimize notifications." This option is found in "Settings -> Advanced -> General -> Main -> Notification level -> Minimize notifications."
• Scan inside archives - BullGuard does not scan archives for malware, by default. If you are concerned about your antivirus protection, you should enable this option. You can find it in "Settings -> Advanced -> Antivirus -> Tuning -> Scan inside archives."
• BullGuard Premium Protection does not come with any predefined scheduled scans set. To enhance the level of protection you get, you should configure a full system antivirus scan scheduled to run once every week or two. You can schedule any antivirus scan in the Antivirus Profiles.

BullGuard Premium Protection is a well-configured security product. If you do not want to fiddle with its settings you can leave it as it is, with one exception: you should create a scheduled antivirus scan.

What is your opinion about BullGuard Premium Protection?

We like BullGuard Premium Protection, and we believe that its antivirus engine is excellent, as well as the other protection modules it bundles. However, the fact that it relies on Windows Firewall for protecting you against network threats is not the best choice in our opinion. What do you think about BullGuard? Comment below and let's discuss.