Consumer Reports Antivirus Rankings.

[Soul Assassin]

Consumer Reports hired a firm to create 5500 new variants of existing viruses to see just how good AV software was at protecting you from new viruses.

And of course the big "security" companies like McAfee were angry at this, since the obvious conclusion to the test would be that their software was hardly infalliable.

http://redtape.msnbc.com/2006/08/consumer_report.html

Consumer Reports recently conducted one of the most thorough tests ever of antivirus programs. But to really put these security programs through the paces, the magazine hired a firm to create 5,500 new viruses, using them to test the antivirus software products for their ability to detect unexpected threats.

Now antivirus companies are crying foul, saying the magazine ignored a long-standing principle not to invent new viruses.

"Creating new viruses for the purpose of testing and education is generally not considered a good idea,” wrote Igor Muttik of McAfee's antivirus lab on a public company blog this week. “Viruses can leak and cause real trouble." The entry helped touch off a firestorm.

I found this remark at Slashdot to be the most fitting and amusing:

Soon they'll propose testing car safety by doing test crashes! Or testing fire retardants by trying to set them on fire. Damn those Consumer Reports fools!

Anyhow, these are the results (found at Slashdot):
BitDefender Standard - 87
Zone Labs ZoneAlarm Antivirus - 85
Kaspersky Labs Anti-Virus Personal - 82
Norton Antivirus - 80
Norton Antivirus for Macintosh - 80
McAfee ViruScan - 77
Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security - 75
Alwil Avast! Antivirus - 68
F-Secure Anti-Virus - 66
Panda Software Titanium AV - 64
CA/eTrust EZ Antivirus - 57
PC Tools AntiVirus - 41

BitDefender at #1 is *very* impressive. I always knew they were good but not that good. eTrust has a pretty disgusting showing and I will be changing my opinion of them from here on out. No matter how efficient the software is I won't use it if it can't detect new viruses. I'm definitely going to be spending more time researching BitDefender's offerings. I already use their virus defs in my GFI implementations but it's probably time to run them for everything.

[Ashpool]

I always tend to hear McAfee get bent-out-of-shape about AV testing. Never from Norton...

And I'm not really that much suprised that the free AVs are toward the bottom.

[cat5e]

Given the fact that part of Viruses detection is based on data base of already released "Junk", and not just AI rules. Generating new viruses sholud deem all AntiVirus Programs look bad (unless there is a plot to make some look bad more than others .

[Soul Assassin]

Being able to detect something more than a virus that the entire world already knows about should be the baseline for determining an antivirus programs' worth IMO.

[hongsc]

Is NOD32 listed?

[vertices]

Yeah I'm curious as to how NOD32 would have fared.

[Nemesys]

Yeah, it seems like they did not evaluate the best and the worst.

The best being NOD32 and the worst being AVG.

[Colossus]

You do know that most antivirus software does not keep all AV signatures in their Database....

They tend to kick certain viruses out of the DB that havent seen the light of day in a long time. That is why most of the time years later you will see an old virus making a come back....

The size of the database would be too large to install on everyones computer if they kept all signatures from every virus ever released. We are talking about a database gigabytes in size :P

[Ashpool]

You do know that most antivirus software does not keep all AV signatures in their Database....

They tend to kick certain viruses out of the DB that havent seen the light of day in a long time. That is why most of the time years later you will see an old virus making a come back....

The size of the database would be too large to install on everyones computer if they kept all signatures from every virus ever released. We are talking about a database gigabytes in size :P

I've never touched the corporate sector, but wouldn't it be very sane for a SysAdmin to have this massive signature file?

[Colossus]

Not really... The amount of CPU time it would take to process that large file, plus pulling updates.. Imagine having to pull the signature from Symantec... Download a 2GB file at 30KB/s.....

Yeah they can provide patches to patch the signature.

There is no antivirus product released now.. Corporate or home world that contains every single signature of old virus. Why do you think we got hit so hard a year ago? with such an old virus. The AV makers determined it was long enough since the last outbreak and removed it from their signature db.

There are corporate level of protection, such as the company I work for. We process all emails for AV through a 35GB database :P of signatures.

[Nemesys]

This is why the better antivirus solutions employ sophisticated heuristic techniques rather than depend on a database.
Since use of heuristics extends the detection capabilities beyond a specific set of known viruses, there is no exact total number of viruses detected by antivirus programs. Of course, there is no antivirus program that detects absolutely all viruses in the world.

[Colossus]

LOL!

There is no such thing as a AV package with Sophisticated Heuristic... As most are just basic crap like Symantec and F-secure, NOD, etc...

And those old viruses will GET passed those so called lame heuristics... Its a given fact.

[Colossus]

The service we sell is 99.999999%.. IT will catch EVERY virus, even when those crappy 3rd party programs will miss it. Our network didnt flinch nor did our clients.

Not a single one that infected millions of PCs.. Not a single outbreak. Was caught by our inhouse developed package. So...

Anyway...

[Ubon94]

I really like the Panda Antivirus so far.

[vairox]

I had etrust but uninstalled it and put in bitdefender 9 profession plus, it's a little weird though.... cant seem to find a "scan system" option anywhere, you can right click drives and folder and choose to scan but that isnt a system scan....