I’ve only heard of Fortinet from VirusTotal as it is one of the antivirus engines that participate in VirusTotal. Fortinet has recently provided a free version of their antivirus program called FortiClient Endpoint Security Suite which is not much of a difference compared to the premium paid version. The only features that is not found in the Standard edition is an antispam protection, central management and logging. For a home user, these features are mostly not needed and the already available features (Antivirus/Antispyware engine, SSL and IPSec VPN clients, Personal Firewall protection, Intrusion Prevention, Web Filtering, Endpoint Application Detection, Endpoint Monitoring and Control, WAN Optimization, Anti-Rootkit Protection, Pre- and Post-Execution Behavioral Analysis, Real-Time Poisoned Webpage Protection, FortiGuard update services) makes it a very complete internet security suite.
free fortinet license
I can’t wait to test the free antivirus from Fortinet because it can be installed on Windows server and is offered free of charge to anyone – consumers, small businesses, large enterprises – who seeks comprehensive protection for their laptops and personal computers. If you didn’t know, the free version of Avira, Avast, AVG and Rising is only meant for home usage. If you install them on corporate or educational environment, that is considered piracy and can be fine.

Here’s what I have to say about the free antivirus by Fortinet.

The setup file is only 10MB in size which I’d considered it to be very small if compared to other antivirus. However the first update takes a very long time to finish, perhaps it is downloading the latest antivirus engine and definition. I also like the interface because it is very neat, simple, easy to understand and use. Every main feature is being categorized at the left hand sidebar and there is very little configuration.

Fortinet Free Antivirus

You don’t really need a powerful computer to run FortiClient. The system requirements are:

  • Pentium processor or equivalent
  • 100 MB hard disk space
  • Compatible Operating System & Minimum RAM
      • - Windows 2000: 128 MB
      - Windows XP 32-bit and 64-bit: 256 MB
      - Windows Server 2003 32-bit and 64-bit: 384 MB
      - Windows Vista: 512 MB
      - Windows 7: 512 MB

    After installing FortiClient on a clean Windows XP Professional SP3 with all latest hotfixes, I am seeing a total of 8 processes with 58MB memory being taken up. Running a full system scan with normal scan priority only takes up 30% CPU usage in average. FortiClient took 9 minutes and 38 seconds to complete scanning 21817 items which is also pretty fast. When I ran a full system scan again the next day, it took only 5 minutes and 2 seconds to scan 21815 files. Very likely FortiClient maintains a database of “safe files not to scan” to cut down the scanning time.

    I’ve planted 21 virus that are currently circulating around the Internet on the test computer and sadly FortiClient only catches 10 out of 21. I noticed that most of the virus that are not detected by FortiClient are from Asian countries such as Brontok and Almanahe.
    forticlient virus detection

    I’ve also tested FortiClient against my private trojan since it came with a firewall and intrusion detection. First of all, the virus signature cannot detect the trojan. When it comes to heuristic analysis, FortiClient also fails to detect any injection. Then I connected my test computer from my laptop using the backdoor trojan, there was no warning on the intrusion detection. I am not surprised why Fortinet scored so badly in Matousec proactive security challenge.

    I also noticed another annoying issue with Fortinet which is I cannot access a shared folder on a local network. When another computer tries to access my shared folder, they get login prompt asking for password when simple file sharing is turned on. I’ve even configured the firewall to “Pass All” which means disabling the firewall, setting the network as Trusted zone and set the security level to Low but still cannot access shared folders. Finally I disabled webfilter and now I can access any shared folders on the network.

    I like the fact that the free FortiClient allows anyone to use for free on any environment and also can be installed on nearly every version of Windows including both 32-bit and 64-bit but they should really work hard on improving the virus detection and firewall protection.

    [ Download FREE FortiClient Endpoint Security Suite ]

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