F-Secure Safe 1 Year Free License

F-Secure Safe is an interesting security program. In the short time that I’ve been using it, I get the distinct feeling that its aim is to do its job and get out of your way. Since I’ve set it up, I can’t recall one pop-up alert telling me about a security scan, a USB drive connected to my system—nothing.

A window did appear every day reminding me that my trial would expire in “X” number of days, but that’s not something you’d see every day as a paying customer.

This reluctance on F-Secure’s part to barge in with notifications is part of an overall more subdued approach to security, it seems to me. When you first open F-Secure Safe it isn’t overflowing with features, or options.

F-Secure takes the approach of enabling the feature by default, which is annoying but probably a fine choice to protect average users. The problem is that Banking protection shuts down everything else. If you need to check received bank transfers with invoices contained on another website, for example, you won’t be able to.

I commonly use Google as a quick and easy calculator while banking to figure out how much money I need to shuttle between my accounts. But with Banking protection enabled I couldn’t do that. It was annoying and frustrating. Security is no good if it gets in the way of your workflow, because you’ll just turn it off, like I did. I’m not the only one either, as a search for “F-Secure turn off banking protection” produced a lot of relevant hits.

F-Secure has a range of pricing for Safe depending on how many devices you want to cover. For three devices it’ll cost you $70 per year, for five it’s $90, and to cover seven you need to fork over $110. Those device numbers include PCs and mobile devices. If you have a family of four, each with their own PC and smartphone (eight devices), you’d have to pay well over $100 for coverage. That’s quite pricey considering that the $100 range commonly gives you the ability to cover 10 devices.

Performance

F-Secure performed very highly in terms of threat detection when tested by A-V Test in late 2017. F-Secure Safe scored 100 percent detection in zero-day, web, and email threats against 185 samples. It also got 100 percent in the regular old malware detection test against 10,684 samples.

Over at AV-Comparatives, F-Secure Safe scored 99.9 percent detection in the organization’s real-world protection test against 1,780 samples during tests carried out between July and November 2017. In the malware-protection test F-Secure Safe rated a 99.93 percent online protection rate, a 98.9 percent online detection rate, and a small dip to 98.6 percent for its offline detection rate. F-Secure Safe also got 22 false alarms in this test, which is quite high.

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