I think the image above that I put together sums things up quite well. Virus Bulletin did another “in the wild” test to see how many of the best antivirus solutions available would be able to catch every known virus they threw at it. Normally out of the 30+ apps that are tested 5 or 6 of them fail, but this time around over 50% of them came up short.
I know I know, there are a lot of no name antivirus programs out there that are seemingly doomed to failure, but some of the most widely used programs couldn’t even get things right. The complete list of failed programs is below, but among them are Avast!, AntiVir, Kaspersky, Norman, Sophos, and Trend Micro. All big names that couldn’t even identify viruses the entire world knows about. *sigh* It’s not like they created their own viruses just for the test.
Here are the results of the test, which were all done on a Windows 2000 machine:
Antivirus Applications that Failed VB100:
- AEC Trustport Antivirus - 7 misses
- Avast! - 2 false positives
- Avira AntiVir - 4 false positives
- CA Antivirus - 40 misses
- Doctor Web - 22 misses and 4 false positives
- Fortinet Forticlient - 4 misses
- Frisk F-PROT
- Ikarus Virus Utilities - 18 misses and 26 false positives
- Iolo Antivirus - 66 misses
- Kaspersky Anti-Virus - 1 miss
- Kingsoft AntiVirus - 120 misses
- Norman Virus Control - 14 misses and 6 false positives
- PCTools Spyware Doctor - 2 false positives
- Redstone Redprotect - 2 misses
- Rising Antivirus - 3 misses and 3 false positives
- Sophos Anti-Virus - 8 misses
- Trend Micro - 4 misses
Antivirus Applications that Passed VB100:
- Agnitum Outpost
- BitDefender AntiVirus
- Bullguard
- CA eTrust
- ESET NOD32
- F-Secure Anti-Virus 2008
- GDATA Anti-virus
- Grisoft AVG
- McAfee VirusScan
- Microsoft Forefront
- MWTI eScan
- PCTools Anti-Virus
- Quick Heal
- Symantec
- VirusBuster
Looking back through the history of the VB100 awards ESET NOD32 has one of the best track records with 47 successful tests and only 3 failures (not counting the ones that have only been tested a handful of times). Here are some of the stats for the antivirus applications that have been tested over 40 times:
- Avast! - 24 successes and 20 failures (55% success)
- CA eTrust - 32 successes and 13 failures (71% success)
- Doctor Web - 25 successes and 22 failures (53% success)
- ESET NOD32 - 47 successes and 3 failures (94% success)
- F-Secure - 27 successes and 13 failures (68% success)
- Grisoft - 19 successes and 22 failures (46% success)
- Kaspersky - 40 successes and 15 failures (73% success)
- McAfee - 34 successes and 19 failures (64% success)
- Norman - 38 successes and 14 failures (73% success)
- Sophos - 39 successes and 14 failures (74% success)
- Symantec - 41 successes and 6 failures (87% success)
So it looks like from the VB100 tests that ESET NOD32 and Symantec are the best performers when it comes to catching viruses that are already in the wild!
[via PC World]
Thanks for the tip CoryC!
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Tags: Software, Windows, Antivirus, Best Antivirus, Eset
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…and ESET NOD32, as compared to Symantec, has a much smaller footprint. I’ve found that it is typically “faster” as well. So, faster, lighter and more accurate!!!
No doubt about that! ESET NOD32 is really the best all around solution that’s available in my opinion.
I have a few words for Symantec, “87% success rate is NOT acceptable.”
I’ve tried out the trial for Eset’s Smart Security suite. It seems to be working pretty well but are there detection rate reviews out for it yet?
Avast! only failed because of 2 false positives? I don’t find that bad. I would rather have false positives than misses….
Pardon my ignorance, but what’s so special about this VB100 thing?
This isn’t entirely fair to Avira AntiVir. “4 false positives” is a pretty good result. True, Avira is well known for false positives, but it did not miss a single actual virus, which is the really critical measure.
I now run ESS on 3 computers at home, and it’s pretty slick. It’s good to know it fares so well in AV tests.
Before that I had used Avira for a few years, and only dropped it because I wanted a suite that included a firewall, and Avira’s suite was giving me bluescreens (the firewall, not the AV component). The redesigned UI in ESS also won me over.
For those who still have to decide which AV to use: one thing I’ve noticed after the switch is that Avira’s real-time scanner is much, MUCH faster than ESS or NOD-32. I pretty much had to restrict the real-time scanner only to specified extensions, disable advanced heuristics and disable runtime packer scanning, otherwise I had to wait a couple of seconds for file access on regular-sized executables and documents - and I have a pretty fast, custom built system. ESS was taking something like 10 (ten) seconds to scan a 30 MB plain text (.txt) file! For some reason it scans executable files of the same size almost instantly, but it seems to have a problem with certain filetypes.
So I get a little miffed when NOD-32 is paraded as the fastest AV engine, also by ESET themselves, and would advise anyone to test for themselves.
There seems to be a lot of conflicting information about the best antivirus software. A new test has reported how well different antivirus products deal with detecting new, unknown malware before it reaches the vendors’ labs.. but it tells a differnt story from VB100
http://www.sophos.com/pressoff.....-test.html
I’m still going to stick with F-Secure Internet Security 2007 until the licence runs out in June even though it takes forever to finish a scan.
Ill try out ESET Internet Security after that, hopefully thats quicker.
The problem with that link is that it is hosted by the developer of the “winner.” While I think that Sophos is a pretty honest company, I still don’t see how their study should be taken any more seriously than the studies found on ESET’s site or any other major dev.
It uses NOD32 for the antivirus, so it would be the same results as NOD32. I haven’t seen any tests on the firewall yet though.
True, but it means it still needs a little work.
If an antivirus program can’t detect viruses that are already known then that is a critical flaw.
I haven’t used Avira before, but ESS was a great buy for myself. I’ve never noticed a delay with the realtime scanner though, like you have. Everything seems to be purring like a kitten.
We’ve written about that kind of test before, but it still only tells one side of the story. Antivirus applications need to catch viruses that have been released as well as ones that haven’t.
There is no “best” antivirus. Each one has its weakness….though some of those are inexcusable (Norton’s ridiculous scan times comes to mind).
Grisoft AVG free version passed and it’s a truely free version, not adware crap. Realtime and email scanning are the same as the full commercial version. You can’t set your own automated scanning other than once a day. BFD. Scan once and turn that off.
Sure would be nice if they’d also test the various freeware and shareware Linux firewalls like Astaro.
What difference do the PAST results make? They’re nothing but a slight indicator of PAST performance which isn’t the same as current performance. They’re not even a good predictor of the future. Author X finds his scanner Y failed on virus type Z so he improves the scanner. That was then, this is now.
My only hope is that ESET won’t be “bought out” by some bloated giant like Symantec.
i use nod32 and i have had absolutely no problems from the past 2 years….3 cheers for eset nod32..
what about clamwin? better still clamav + ubuntu. cheers
Although I was pleased to see that my firewall of choice, bitdefender, had passed, it should always be kept in mind that the results of antivirus tests will vary with the methodology used. (That said, I do agree that catching known viruses is an absolute bottom-line entry point for competency.)
And then, there’s an old adage in science: “Absence of proof is not proof of absence”. When your antivirus tells you “no viruses found” it means exactly that: the program didn’t *find* any viruses, but that does not necessarily mean that there *are no* viruses in your computer.
It’s a shame that making multiple antivirus programs live happily on a single computer is difficult…
Anyhoo
I think 2 false positives is good enough for me to stick with Avast! It is lean enough for me to prefer it over Symantec.
I didn’t say it was the best…I agree with you on this one.
If you want to roll out anti-virus on a corporate level to servers and workstations, the ESET is still very good…and Avast! [in my opinion] not as robust…but on the personal use front - Avast! is free for home use and fails on 2 false positives. So what do you think I run at home?
They do actually test some of the Linux antivirus applications in a separate test, and I might do a write up about that.
I have to disagree with that. I think that you can look at the past results as a good indicator of how the apps will perform in the future. Look at how many times ESET has passed compared to the others. That means they have had to fix very little as a result of the tests.
That would be absolutely terrible, but I don’t think ESET will sell out like that.
I would definitely use Avast! over Symantec. You won’t see me disagreeing with that.
Always used Norton, Always will. I sooner give up some system resources for good protection than use something like AVG.
Even if that false positive is a critical operating system file that’s gets removed and then the OS won’t boot?
Accuracy matters.
[Poor performance] + [Uses massive system resources] = [Bad anti-virus]