Against Unknown Viruses, Avira AntiVir the Winner For Now

KingofGnG writes "AV-Comparatives, the Austrian team of experts dedicated to antivirus tests acknowledged as a reference point in the field, has published the second part of the mid-year comparative, an ideal addendum to the one already released last September. This time the aim is to evaluate the antimalware tools' effectiveness against unknown threats in a test scenario meant to prove the heuristic part and the generic markers of the on-demand scanning engines." The best in show (of 16 anti-malware packages evaluated), Avira AntiVir was able to find 71% of the unknown malware it was exposed to in the first week, dropping to 67% after the fourth.

Comments

Re:mine is better

[lysergic.acid]

still, i think a better (more useful) test would be conducted by:

1. enlisting a 100 or so test subjects from various non-technical (in terms of computer knowledge) backgrounds.
2. give each one of the 9 best-selling anti-virus solutions to 10 different volunteers.
3. give the last 10 volunteers a 2-week course on basic computer security and malware-prevention.
4. subject all 100 subjects to the same gauntlet of viruses/trojans/malware over a 6-month period. (perhaps 4-5 viruses a week, for a total of around 120 threats tested)
5. note how many infections per person each group averaged, how many false-positives each group reported, and how much time/productivity was lost due to the threats & false-positives--for instance, time spent on reboots, reformats, dealing with virus alerts, waiting for anti-virus updates, etc.
6. lastly, measure the cost-effectiveness of the anti-virus solution used in each of the 10 groups.

i suspect that preventative education/training is probably the most effective method of combating viruses & malware. and though it might not be cost-effective in the short-term, it might be cheaper to train long-term employees how to avoid viruses/malware than to pay for yearly-subscriptions and still suffer down-time and loss of productivity from infections.