This is the time of year for the security companies to update their security suites and put next year in the name. It's also time for PC Magazine to test them and report. Here it is, the 2008 Security Suite Smackdown.

There are five suites in this review and only four use "2008" in their name. Kaspersky is still using old-fashioned version numbers, 7.0 to be exact. All five products have some serious strengths and you can tell that they're all maturing somewhat:

BitDefender Total Security 2008—Good anti-malware, new backup and performance tuning modules.
CA Internet Security Suite Plus 2008—Improved firewall and tamper-resistant web-filtering.
Kaspersky Internet Security 7.0—Excellent malware protection and high-quality cleaning.
Norton Internet Security 2008—New Identity Safe manages personal information and passwords.
Panda Internet Security 2008—Best-ever anti-spyware test results.

But that's just the good news. Read the whole review to get the whole picture. This is an important buying decision.

I don't like the CA product for personal reasons.  I've used way too many CA "Security" products that wound up having so many holes that they knew about and decided not to fix, that their "Security" product wound up being the biggest hole in my environment.  I have trust issues with them.