Verizon Wireless has announced a mobile security app that combines McAfee antivirus and web-security protection with Asurian's recovery services, namely remote locate, alarm, lock, and wipe. And depending on how you view bloatware, you will be thrilled or annoyed to hear that the app will soon join Verizon's tray of preloaded apps.
Verizon Mobile Security is already available today via Google Play, and comes with two tiers of protection. The free Basic plan gives you McAfee's antivirus and web protection (via McAfee SiteAdvisor). These features are also part of McAfee's own mobile security suite, which ranked in the top tier of AV-Test's mobile security test.
A Premium subscription, for $1.99/month, adds McAfee App Alert–an app permissions advisor–and recovery features from Asurion. If a user loses his device, he can perform a few mitigating commands by logging into a web-based console to remotely geolocate, blast an alarm, lock, and wipe data from the device. Verizon customers with have Total Equipment Coverage installed, a $6.99/month warranty add-on, can upgrade to Premium for $1 instead. Verizon will also be releasing versions for iOS and Blackberry in the near future.
So how does this differ from McAfee Mobile Security? "We've gone through a great deal of work to make sure this app has more access than any antivirus out there. Deeper scans, and the battery life is optimized for Verizon devices," Renato Delatorre, director of network security at Verizon Wireless, told Security Watch.
We'll be spending some hands-on time with the app in the near future, but on the outset, another major difference is that Verizon Mobile Security requires a data connection for periodic updates, which could potentially drain battery and processing power. On the other hand, it could also benefit from performance updates that are timed with Verizon's own OS patching schedule. Premium subscribers won't have another bill to worry about either, the service will just be added to their monthly phone bills.
The app will also soon come preloaded on all Verizon devices, Delatorre said, forcing an enormous pool of consumers to consider an app that most would rather ignore.
This isn't the first time a carrier has collaborated with a security vendor. Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile all offer its customers special rates for Lookout and McAfee security apps, while T-Mobile preloads Lookout on about a dozen devices. However Verizon Mobile Secuity already supports more than 30 devices running Android 2.1 and up,and I'm keen to see what the partnership of one of America's largest carriers and one of America's largest security vendors will mean for the mobile security industry in the long run.
The backup selection process remains as wonky as it was years ago—it feels more like a Unix directory listing than it does a Mac-style user-friendly approach to selecting files, especially when viewed in Advanced mode. For more-experienced users, that geekiness is an advantage, revealing otherwise-hidden folders that may contain files and nested folders that require backup when you’re not using disk mirroring.
The backup selection has a beautiful threaded interaction, so that as you proceed through selecting and deselecting files, the Storage Bar at the bottom calculates how many files you will place on its service—and whether you’ll need to buy more storage from SpiderOak to do so. Prefab checkboxes with bright colors to their left let you pick major categories in the user folder, while the main browser window provides granular selection of folders and files. You can also search for files across your entire drive, and add external drives to the backup. If you switch to Basic mode, the prefab checkboxes take up the main window, and the search functions disappear. Essentially, in Basic mode, you decide what gets backed up based on SpiderOak’s broad-based categories.
SpiderOak provides a host of backup tweaks for those who like to restrict backups beyond just selecting certain files. Most welcome are options like “Don’t backup files larger than” a specified number of megabytes, and the ability to exclude files by wildcards. You can also specify the frequency for backup, sync, and sharing operations separately—anywhere from Automatic to a set time. If your broadband throughput is limited, this variety of options helps keep your network from becoming clogged. There’s even a prominent Pause All Uploads button on the Status tab.
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