Panda Cloud Pro. Version 3

I am not familiar with all the aspects of the pro version. So I was wondering what users think of this review and any criticisms contained within. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2458071,00.asp

 

I experienced some interesting behaviour of Panda Endpoint protection today. At my work we switched from Avast to Panda Cloud few weeks back. Today I decided I will replace it with ESET on my computer. I went to uninstall Panda Endpoint Protection from Add/Remove. I failed to notice that there is also Panda Endpoint Agent installed and didn't uninstall it. After that I installed ESET and everything was fine.
Today I suddenly got message from Action Center that my system is not secure and I don't have AV installed. And surely there was no ESET icon in my systray. I checked process monitor to see what's happening and there was no ESET processes running - only Panda agent. I went to Add/Remove to remove agent and I couldn't as Panda agent was installing other application. After a minute or two I had fully functional Panda running and no trace of ESET.
So Panda agent uninstalled ESET in background and reinstalled Panda without my knowledge . Uninstalling 3rd party AV is not wise, IMO. I don't know how they do it either. Do they run ESET's own uninstaller? What if anything goes wrong during uninstallation?
That was really unpleasant surprise from Panda...

 

If your company has changed to Panda cloud and someone in the organisation decides on his/her own to install a different vendor, then i would think this is a normal policy in a company. You can't have users decide on their what they would like to install in a business network.

 

Yes, I agree to a point. In this case it would be better to not allow installation of other AV in the first place. Automatic uninstallation seems dangerous to me. How does Panda Agent know how to properly uninstall all third party Avs? What if there is a problem during this process?

 

Two things:

1. Firewalls should not be the selling point IMHO in determining what AV suite you like best and want to use. There are so many other important aspects, this is not Zonealarm and 2002 anymore lots have happened since.

2. Stealth ports means nothing in terms of how effective the FW is. It just means you aren't "visible" & responding to pings and the theory if you can't be seen you can be attacked which is not true. In general i think users worry too much over a hacker hacking their pc, worry about exploits from surfing, rootkits and trojans if one wants to worry.

I use Panda on one of my pc's and Webroot on the rest. I have no problems with either and think in general users fret too much over charts of what options a suite contains instead of using what THEY like from a pool of effective major players like Panda and others. I think that was three btw!

 

No, it's not a problem at all if what i suspect is true. I'm not familiar with the controls your admin has with the Panda control panel. We use a different product, but i suspect he already has you singled out via monitoring and might even have uninstalled Eset remotely. Thats what i would do (i'm an admin), consider yourself lucky you haven't heard anything from them yet, in my company you would already have been to a meeting with management!

 

I don't think that he can do that using Panda's control panel. He's also on vacation so I doubt he did this But I will talk to him to see if he can check up the installation and settings. In our company we don't have a strict policy regarding which AV we are using so there shouldn't be any problem

 

Regarding the third point, is it Panda Pro or free you are using?

 

Pro, but i wouldn't feel less secure with "only" the free version..JMHO. They both feel very light and i see none of the issue some apparently see in the other thread.

It's just my nature to support, i always uninstall the toolbar/url filter btw, i don't think it's good enough.

 

Thank you. Now I have heard that the Panda firewall can be used in conjunction with the windows firewall. Is that correct?

 

No idea, it's turned off on mine.