Antivirus

Panda Dome Essential

Panda Security is a Spanish-based company with a strong record of antivirus innovations. From launching daily signature updates in 1998, to introducing behavioral monitoring in 2004 and cloud scanning in 2007, Panda has been involved with a host of technologies we now take for granted.Panda Dome Essential goes well beyond the basics of real-time antivirus…

Published 8 years ago in 11th January 2019

By John

Panda Dome Essential goes well beyond the basics of real-time antivirus protection with URL filtering, a simple firewall to block network attacks, and even free VPN access. Okay, with no choice of location and a 150MB per day free data allowance you won’t be using it for streaming movies or heavy torrenting, but it’s fine for emailing on public Wi-Fi hotspots when you’re out and about.

The package is reasonably priced at £26.24 ($34) for a one-year license, especially as you’re covered for unlimited Windows, Mac and Android devices. As usual, the small print qualifies that ‘unlimited’ promise somewhat, saying that it’s for ‘one customer in one household only’ and is ‘subject to limitations on reasonable home use.’ But as long as you’re not trying to cheat the system and cover every PC in your entire office, Panda is unlikely to complain.

You can sign up for Panda Dome Essential here

If Dome Essential isn’t powerful enough for you, opting for the £35.25 ($46) Dome Advanced gets you parental controls, additional layers of ransomware and ‘advanced threats protection’, and identity protection while banking and shopping online.

The next step up, Dome Complete, adds encryption, system clean-up tools and a password manager for £53.24 ($69), while the £89.24 ($116) Dome Premium gets you unlimited VPN access to all locations, and unlimited premium technical support.

Setup

Panda Dome Essential has a 30-day trial available on the website, and we found, downloaded and launched the build in a few seconds.

The installer is a little more intrusive than expected, and by default it changes both your search provider and home page to try and keep you safe. That’s a couple of steps too far, for us, but both options are clearly visible within the installer and you can turn them off immediately.

Once setup was complete, Dome Essential asked us to register the program by providing our email address. We prefer antivirus which allows us to stay anonymous, but many competitors do much the same, and at least we didn’t have to provide any payment details.

Installation was relatively speedy, with no complaints about ‘incompatible’ software or other hassles. There was a short delay while Dome Essential ran a quick initial scan, but the main program console then appeared and was ready for use.

Panda has always claimed to be one of the most lightweight antivirus apps around, so we were interested to see how it behaved. Dome Essential added four core background processes to our test system, a little more than usual, but these typically consumed a minimal 20-50MB RAM during normal PC use. We’ve seen some competitors grab 10 times as much.

Checking Panda’s installed files revealed one possible explanation – they took up just 124MB – but there were some oddities, too. Several of the f

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Bitdefender parental control review: Plans and pricing

Bitdefender no longer offers its parental control features as a standalone subscription. You’d have to get one of its four family plans. But note that its entire suite of parental control features is available with each of these four plans.

The Total Security Family plan starts at $79.99 for the first year and covers up to 25 devices across five family members. At this price, the cost boils down to around $16 per member per year, which is more affordable than many other parental control applications. Not to forget that, for the price, you also get 24/7 real-time antivirus protection for up to 25 devices, as well as a password manager.

Bitdefender Family pricing — (Image credit: Bitdefender)

Next is the Premium Security Plan, which costs $99.99 for the first year and also comes with scam protection, AI-based scam protection, and a VPN with 4,000+ servers in 50+ countries. The Ultimate Security Family Plan and the Ultimate Security Plus Family Plan cost $119.99 and $199.99 for the first year, respectively.

The former comes with dark web monitoring and identity theft protection features such as an identity protection score and real-time breach notifications, while the latter also includes $2 million in identity theft insurance, three-bureau credit monitoring, and other bank, credit card, and investment alerts.

Bitdefender parental control review: Features

One of the standout Bitdefender parental control features is the ability to set screen-time schedules for your children, who would only be able to access their devices during the allowed time intervals.

Along with this, Bitdefender also offers several preset routines: Focus Time, Family Time, and Bedtime, which you can customize as per your child’s daily activity and schedule.

Bitdefender parental control dashboard — (Image credit: Bitdefender)

There’s also a pretty handy internet time management feature, which allows you to control how much time your child spends on the internet during a day. A nice addition is the ability to reward extra screen time for your children for responsible online use.

In addition to internet scheduling, parents can also choose to cut off internet access directly on their child’s device using Bitdefender’s Stop Internet feature.

Bitdefender also offers predefined age-appropriate filtering categories to help you filter out inappropriate content such as porn, betting, or online gaming for your children. As with screen time, you can also fine-tune these filters to better suit your child’s day-to-day use.

Apart from category-level filtering, parents can also allowlist or blocklist specific URLs individually, in case you want to go beyond the category selection.

Parents can set up to five child profiles, each with the child’s name, photo, and birth date. Bitdefender automatically applies age-appropriate filtering as soon as the profile is created, which parents can then edit as per their needs.

Along with this, there’s also location tracking, which helps you know where your child is on an interactive map at all times.

Lastly, there’s Safe Search, which lets you remove explicit and harmful results from search engines, as well as YouTube restrictions, which ensure your child only views age-appropriate videos on the platform.

However, note that content filtering and safe browsing require an active VPN connection to function, as per Bitdefender’s listing on the Google Play Store.

Bitdefender parental control review: Interface and in-use

Bitdefender parental control works across Android, Windows, iOS, and macOS. That said, Windows and Android get full, unrestricted enforcement of every feature, whereas macOS and iOS are noticeably more limited, largely due to Apple’s own platform restrictions.

For instance, iOS content filtering runs through Apple’s Screen Time and not Bitdefender’s own engine. Parents have to create a child account through Apple ID, then Bitdefender’s app hooks into Apple’s Screen Time restrictions rather than doing its own independent content filtering.

However, the setup is pretty simple. You just have to download the app on your child’s own device. Unlike other parental control applications, you can’t download the app on your child’s phone remotely – you’ll need physical access to the device to do so.

One thing worth noticing is that, after the 2025 overhaul, parental control is no longer configured within the Bitdefender Central mobile app, but from the Bitdefender Central web dashboard, which can still be accessed through the mobile application.

Once you’re on this dashboard, day-to-day use is genuinely easy. Bitdefender’s Activity Dashboard is filled with several graphs and charts, which allow you to check your child’s phone activity at just a glance.

For example, there’s a bar chart showing their daily internet time over the past few days, as well as a pie chart showing their current day’s internet usage along with their remaining time. The dashboard also gives parents visibility into what’s actually being blocked and when.

The Prevented Content Access panel is a running log of every link blocked on the child’s device over the past 7 or 30 days. This allows you to see whether your filtering settings are actually able to catch anything, or whether your child is repeatedly trying to search for restricted websites on their device.

Bitdefender par

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Macworld The security, antivirus, and VPN company Malwarebytes has an interesting post on its Malwarebytes Labs blog detailing a new and sophisticated scam. The web-based trick is meant to make users think that they just made a big payment with Apple Pay, with the goal being to trick them into calling a fake “Apple Support”

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Panda Dome Essential

Setup

Bitdefender Family parental control review

Bitdefender parental control review: Plans and pricing

Bitdefender parental control review: Features

Bitdefender parental control review: Interface and in-use

Bitdefender par

Microsoft Defender briefly decided Google Search was malware

5 Windows Security Settings You Should Never Skip Over

Watch out for this fake Face ID Apple Pay pop-up scam

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