Qihoo 360 Software is big in China, with nearly a half-billion users, but it's not nearly as well-known in the U.S. That's a bit of a shame, because the company's 360 Internet Security 2013 is an attractive, easy-to-use, free antivirus. Yes, despite the suite-sounding name, it's a standalone antivirus product.
The installer cuts out unnecessary clicks and screens. A single click accepts the license agreement and starts the product installing. It's a quick process. However, the necessary initial antivirus signature update can take quite a while—over 15 minutes on some of my test systems.
360 Internet Security's main window has a modern, flat look and uses cheery pastel colors. The main focus is on three buttons that perform a quick, full, or custom scan. Although the interface is spacious and uncluttered, it actually conveys a lot of information. Small banners in one corner offer statistics on performance and quarantined files. Three icons animate to let you know when each of the three antivirus engines is updating. And you can pull down a high-level set of controls that turn security components on and off.
Minor Installation Bumps
On eight of my twelve malware-infested virtual machines, the antivirus installed with no more than a minor hitch. However, malware on three of the test systems actively terminated the installer every time I tried to launch it. I successfully installed the product in Safe Mode (kudos to Qihoo for allowing Safe Mode installation!). The installation succeeded, but in each case it would not fully update. The final solution involved running a full scan, performing a full uninstall/reinstall, updating malware definitions, and running another full scan.
The remaining system causes problems for every antivirus I test, because ransomware totally covers up the desktop, even in Safe Mode. Qihoo has a bootable rescue CD, but it's strictly Chinese. Given that this rescue CD could have solved the problem, I helped out a bit, working around the ransomware to get the product installed.
A product that breezes through the install process with next to no problems earns five stars for ease of installation. 360 Internet Security did pretty well, enough to earn four stars.
Quite Good Cleanup
This antivirus divides a full scan into five stages: correcting system security settings, checking applications for malware, looking for active threats in memory, evaluating files that launch at startup, and finally scanning all files for malware. It clearly displays which steps have finished, and offers a choice between highest speed and least impact on performance.
On completing a scan it displays a simple list of all malware traces. It doesn't rank them by threat level the way Ad-Aware Free Antivirus+ 10.5and avast! Free Antivirus 8 do, nor does it aggregate the traces belonging to the same malware the way Comodo Cleaning Essentials 6 and Spybot - Search & Destroy 2.0 do. However, you can get a view of related traces by sorting on the malware type column.
The scanner components in AVG Anti-Virus FREE 2013 and Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition (2014) remove malware traces upon finding them, as much as possible. 360 Internet Security waits for your permission to clean up the found traces. On almost all of the test systems, the antivirus requested a quick scan after cleanup finished, to catch any "hidden dangers," and then requested a reboot to remove a "stubborn virus."
360 Internet Security detected 75 percent of the malware samples, the same as avast!, Norman Malware Cleaner 2.08, and several others. Its 5.8 point score also matched avast!'s. Bitdefender Free detected 81 percent and scored 6.2 points. The top score among products tested using my current malware collection, 6.6 points, went to Bitdefender Antivirus Plus (2014).
Tested using my previous malware collection, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware 1.70 earned 7.1 points, the top score among all current products. For details about how I run the malware removal test, please see How We Test Malware Removal.
360 Internet Security 2013 malware removal chart
