Security Score rates your PC’s state of security

Security Score rates your PC’s state of security:
If you had to assess your computer’s security setup, how good – or bad – would you say it is? Would you say it is well protected against threats you may encounter locally or remotely, or can’t you really say how good the security software and settings are?
Opswat’s Security Score may help you if you want to a third party assessment of your PC’s state of security. Here is how it works. All you need to do is run the program after you have downloaded it to the PC you want to check. You need to check the “I agree to the terms and conditions” box on the start page and click on the start button afterwards to run the scan. The scan itself should not take longer than 30 seconds to complete.
The program displays the overall score, the maximum is 100 on the same page. Here you also see the scores of areas the program has scanned.

Green groups highlight areas where you have scored a perfect score, yellow a normal score and red a bad score.  The program scans the system for the following information:

• Firewall: whether a firewall is installed and enabled on the system.
• Hard Disk Encryption: whether encryption software is installed and if data on the primary hard drive is encrypted
• Patch managed: whether Automatic Updates are enabled.
• Backup: whether backup software is enabled and backups have been created.
• Public file sharing: if P2P software is installed on the PC.
• Antivirus: If antivirus software is installed, if it supports real-time protection, when it was updated the last time and whether a full system scan was performed recently.
• Anti-Phishing: If Anti-Phishing is enabled in browsers – only Internet Explorer and Firefox are listed – and if third party software is installed that protects the PC from phishing attacks as well.

The quick rundown is interesting for a quick glance but it is not the best representation of a system’s state of security. You do get a 20/20 backup score for instance if you are using Dropbox and syncing data regularly to the service. You get that score even if you do not sync important files with the file hosting service.
The same is true for patch management for instance. If you prefer to update Windows manually and in time you will get 0 points for patch management even though your system’s is well protected in this regard.

Verdict

The program can help you get a quick overview of the state of security of a Windows installation. While it won’t go far beyond that, it is helpful to get an overall impression of the security. The program could use some work, scan popular software like web browsers or browser plugins for instance or check if all updates are installed for Windows on top of what it is making available right now.

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