Posted by Virus Bulletin on Apr 10, 2013
Figures released for long-term real-world tests and large-scale scanning measures.
Hot on the heels of the recent report from AV-Test, the latest sets of figures from Austrian testing outfit AV-Comparatives have been released, with both their large-scale detection test, published twice a year, and the latest installment of their rolling 'real-world' protection measures going public.
In the straight 'File Detection' tests, coverage of a large set of malware is balanced against false positives, with statistical clustering used to group products with similar scores. Avira, Bitdefender, BullGuard, F-Secure and Kaspersky all merited the highest 'Advanced+' award, while Avast, ESET, Fortinet, McAfee, Sophos, Emsisoft, eScan, G Data and Panda rated as 'Advanced' - the last four scoring high for detection but marked down thanks to false alarms. AVG, VIPRE and Trend Micro were all labelled 'Standard', while AhnLab and Symantec were classed as merely 'Tested', both scoring well below the rest of the group at a similar level to the free Microsoft Security Essentials, which is not granted a rating as it is considered to be part of the operating system. AhnLab and Symantec were also both found to have 'very many' false positives, while Microsoft was the only vendor to achieve none at all.
The 'Real-World Protection Test' is run twice a year from March to June and from August to November, and the first set of figures for this year have also been made public. The test is run on fully patched Windows 7 this year, which has meant that 45% of the test cases tried were unable to penetrate thanks to patches on previously vulnerable software. In the end, some 422 unique test cases were used during the month, with test systems exposed to the threats in a highly realistic manner to test all aspects of protection provided by the solutions. Leading the field so far are Emsisoft, F-Secure, G Data, Kaspersky and Qihoo 360, all of which managed to block 100% of the test cases. The final results of the long-term test will be released in July.
Full details of the tests can be found at the AV-Comparatives website, here.
Posted on 10 April 2013 by John Hawes
