The company said these security flaws: 'could only be exploited by malware that has escalated admin rights and has not been detected by any of our technologies (signatures, Cloud, heuristics, contextual routines, behavioral protection,…).' Panda also said it had 'taken note' of our suggestion for a fix for the most significant attack, though didn't commit to applying it. A common example might be via a spam email, with text which persuaded you to open an attached Office document, and then run an embedded macro. These exploits required an attacker persuading you to run a malicious script or macro on your system, with Administrator rights. The second effectively removed all Panda's protective layers, enabling malware to do whatever it liked. One of our test attacks successfully disabled part of Panda's real-time file scanning system, allowing us to download malicious files without detection. Testing Panda's self-protection revealed a couple of vulnerabilities. Malware sometimes tries to disable an antivirus before launching a full infection attempt, so it's important any security app can defend itself. (Image credit: Panda Security) Self-protection It's not perfect - too many buttons just open a browser tab, rather than do anything locally - but we found it reasonably easy to use. Selecting a button takes you to that function, where a Back button returns you to the main dashboard when you're done. Functions are accessed via 17 buttons (Scan, Firewall, Support and so on.) That's a lot, but button icons do a reasonable job of telling you what they do, and you can turn on captions for all buttons with a click.

Otherwise, the main interface works well. (We checked Panda's Support site to find out what 'Show Panda News' was supposed to do, but couldn't find it mentioned anywhere. We found a 'Show Panda News' switch in Settings, and turned off, hoping this would help but no, it didn't make any difference at all. There's another small annoyance in a regularly updated banner at the bottom of the dashboard, with links to various blog posts on the Panda site. You must scroll down to access everything. The app has four rows of buttons for various functions, but Panda is so keen on leaving free space for you to view the photo, that only the first row of buttons is visible. This looks good, but creates an immediate usability issue. Panda Dome's interface stands out immediately for its desktop-style wallpaper background.

Panda dome essential review