Comparison Of The Best Anti Viruses Available

Andreas Clementi, who runs the web site av-comparatives.org, has released his latest report that looks at how well antivirus programs do against threats that have not yet been identified and included in standard AV signatures. The test looked at 17 different products, including offerings from Symantec, McAfee, AVG, Kaspersky, and Microsoft, and tested how well releases dated February 2 (with no updates) fared against a swath of new malware—viruses, scripts, trojans, and other nasties—that were discovered between February 2 and May 2. Here I present a small summary of the same:

Tested Products:

Avast! Professional Edition 4.7
AVG Anti-Malware 7.5
AVIRA AntiVir Personal Edition Premium 7.03
BitDefender Professional Plus 10
Dr.Web for Windows 95-XP 4.33.2
eScan Anti-Virus 8.0
ESET NOD32 Anti-Virus 2.70.23
Fortinet FortiClient 3.0
F-Prot for Windows 6.0.5.1
F-Secure Anti-Virus 7.01
G DATA AntiVirusKit (AVK) 17.0
Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0.2
McAfee VirusScan 11.1
Microsoft OneCare 1.5
Norman Virus Control 5.82
Symantec Norton Anti-Virus 14.0
TrustPort Antivirus Workstation 2.5

If you plan to buy an Anti-Virus, please visit the vendor’s site and evaluate their software by downloading a trial version, as there are also many other features (e.g. firewall, behavior blocker, etc.) and important things (e.g. compatibility, graphical user interface, language, price, etc.) for an Anti-Virus that you should evaluate by yourself. Even if quite important, the data provided in the test reports on this site are just some aspects that you should consider when buying Anti-Virus software.

Test Results:

[click on images to enlarge them]

Summary Results:

Overall, the tests seem to indicate that for dealing with malware, the two leading programs (McAfee and Norton) are quite firmly in the middle of the pack in terms of effectiveness, and Microsoft evidently has some work to do to bring OneCare up to the level of its competitors.

The PDF version could be downloaded from here.

Tags: security tricks

8 Responses to “Comparison Of The Best Anti Viruses Available”

Renata 30 September 2007 at 2:01 am #

Hi!
Information Security Carnival 3rd edition is up here, and your article was selected!

Comment, link to us! Spread the word!

Reply
rambhai 18 January 2008 at 8:04 pm #

nice post mate~~~i use norton systemworks~~~thats the most simplest and safest norton to use buddy~~mc afee is kinda dull

Reply
gay best 9 April 2008 at 9:37 pm #

McAfee Is The Bestest Than Them Realy…)

Reply
RedPrince 1 July 2008 at 7:34 pm #

There is no such thing as the BEST AV. From personal experience -and I’m in the field and know what I say- If you’re a home user, your best options would be NOD32 and Kaspersky as they are light and don’t consume much resources. They have great detection rates, but one, very fatal, flow. To keep the products “light”, both companies remove old virus signatures that are not in the latest wild list. In other words, if you receive a 9 years old virus, it will just get through and do what it wills.
If you’re using it for your work though, TrustPort is your safest bet as it uses 4 famous AV engines -not just one or two as its second best- in addition to another fifth antispam engine.

Reply
Salman 1 July 2008 at 9:31 pm #

good to see some expert turning up to share his views..

what do you think about AVG for home users? I have found to work well.

Thanks for informing us that NOD removes old virus def from its database..this was something new for me…

Reply