Steel Security, powered by Bullguard, is Steelpad's computer security software that is geared toward the gaming community. Steel Security's features include a firewall, spam filter, anti-virus software, and more. Furthermore, when you start a game, Steel Security stops everything else and makes sure nothing interrupts the gameplay. Moreover, there are no annoying pop-ups asking you if you want to update, and there are no surprise virus scans either.

This article goes in depth and reviews each feature point by point to cover all of the pros and cons of Steel Security.

Main Menu

Not so much a security-oriented feature as an aesthetic one, it is so well done that it had to be mentioned. Opening up Steel Security brings up a menu that is very easy to navigate. Unlike some other brands of security software, it is well-balanced. It is very easy to use, yet the user still has access to advanced options to further customize the program.

Firewall

The Steel Security firewall is not significantly different than other firewall programs out there. When a program is being executed that requires Internet access, it asks the user for permission to allow access to the internet. However this firewall goes above and beyond the others. It allows you to monitor and control everything that connects to the internet while you’re playing games. You can use game profiles to change the settings on a game by game basis. For example, if you start Quake 3, it starts the Quake 3 profile. You can set the Quake 3 profile to block Firefox and stop any downloads, but allow Ventrilo and IRC.

A complete list of games supported can be found here. But you can always add your own

This feature is over aggressive by default, and users may have to change the settings for each game. One example is, when you’re playing Counter-Strike, it puts Steam as a second priority program. This causes many random errors until I prioritized Steam. The profiles are also slow to switch when you exit games, my computer came to a halt until Steel Security had switched profiles. The profiles also do not handle minimizing. You have to wait until you’re done to browse the web, or allow your browser to access the net and possibly lag you with downloads. Another possible inconvenience that might not be Steel Security's fault, is that when it stops a download, it takes a good two minutes to resume the download.

Anti-virus

The anti-virus is powered by Bullguard, which in recent tests by virus.gr scored a very high 95%. It is a slow scanner in my experience, taking a second or two to scan each music, picture, video, executable, or compressed file. At one point during a test run it got stuck on a .png for a full minute. According to the log, it scanned 1020 files per minute. This can be considered slow or fast, but the anti-virus will definitely take an hour or two for any computer with some games installed.

Like most virus scanners, you can schedule it to scan your entire computer or a few folders. However, the schedules are ignored if you’re playing a game at the time. Another feature is real time file monitoring, which stop viruses before they can damage to your computer.

Spam filter

This spam filter works through Microsoft Outlook/Outlook Express, sad news for those of us using Thunderbird. It works as a collaborative effort, allowing you to upload spam messages you receive to a server, helping Steelpad create a database to combat spam. When you receive a spam message in Outlook, just hit the “This is spam” button and the message will be uploaded to Steel Security. It also has a whitelist, a list of email addressees to always trust. This just collects email addresses of people you have sent mail to in the past, and marks them as trusted.

Backup

This gives you 1GB of backup space by default. There is an option to pay more to get more space. This seems like a very handy idea, so you can upload configs and demos to back them up. It is very handy for people who reformat their computer often, as you can retrieve files over the internet. The first thing I thought when I was looking at this was, “No web interface?” It turns out there will be a web interface eventually, just not right now. So when this is officially released, you can backup and retrieve files on any computer that has an internet connection by logging into Steel Security’s website.

Conclusion

This is a solid product with a few minor flaws that may be fixed in time. Despite me uninstalling any anti-virus and firewall product a long time ago, I plan on buying this product. Steelpad really did a good job with this by adding many features gamers have long wanted out of their security programs in one easy to use package.