Review of Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.0

What the main screen looks like.

What the detected threats chart looks like.

Panda Cloud Antivirus is the Anti-virus from Panda Security’s. It is completely free, and unlike Microsoft security essentials isn’t locked to certain markets but rather languages. The available languages include; English,  German, and  Spanish. PCA comes in 21mb, so it’s not a large or small download.

When you first install the Antivirus it will ask for an account since you need to register. Currently this is for the forum, and general statistics, yet detected threats don’t stay with you after you uninstall it. It will not bug you to do a quick scan since it will do it in the background. When you first open it will guide to the recycle bin which will hold threats that are freshly detected but not fully removed as they are being sent to panda to see if it’s a threat.

Panda Cloud Antivirus is different from other AV’s in the sense that it does not solely rely on malware signatures but rather a global list of known good and bad files “in the cloud” which means it goes out to panda’s servers to see if the file checks out. As such you did need to be always connected to the internet for it to work, but it does store a small cache of known good and bad files, although its meant for computers that are always connected to the internet.

The antivirus does not come with a firewall so it will rely on which ever you have. Currently like most AV’s it’s for Windows only (XP-Windows 7). It can detect virus’s, worms, trojans, spyware, adware, dialers, jokes, and other malware. Since it’s always connected it will detect all threats seen by Panda Security’s.

A test of its detection rate showed that of 14 new malware samples it detected 9, marked 3 as suspicious, and completely ignored 4 of them. After execution all 4 ignored samples stayed ignored. Although it did detect the malware that came from this. One of the samples would not delete and needed my test machine to be restarted.

After a restart multiple your computer is infected prompts opened up. Panda ignored all of them. A combofix later and the messages were gone. So really it failed on that point.

Over all PCA is a good free internet based antivirus that is good at detecting most threats. It won’t slow down your machine, or constantly bug you for updates. So really, unless your crazy full of new malware go ahead and download it from here.