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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.
My custom anti-virus solution is better. It blocks 100% of all known and unknown viruses. Just don't ask what its false positive rate is...
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
I'm surprised MalwareBytes isn't on the list. We've come to depend on it for removing zlob from problematic PCs.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Okay, how does it detect something that's unknown? I think it would be better phrasing to say "this scanning engine has the best heuristic pattern matching algorithms amongst those products tested." But perhaps that's too techie and we should go with "zomg! finds viruses and kills zem dead! nom nom nom." :)
In either event, I have yet to have any antivirus product I use detect anything using its built-in heuristic scanner. But it sure does slow the machine down, as I'm sure many techies out there reading this from work will know by the curse word "Norton." And if I were a virus writer, I would have every antivirus product in my lab running to test against before releasing it as a matter of course. Could it be this thing is only effective because most virus writers haven't heard of it?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
This is an interesting test, but some market leaders are missing, notably Trend (El Reg quotes Gartner saying Trend has 13.8% market share, third after Symantec and McAfree). If I am to use this research to pick a solution or to pick a better solution, the chances are high that someone in the management is going to "suggest" (try to make me use...) "Trend" because they've heard of it; if they suggest "McAfee" I can use this research to shoot that down, but not Trend.
Meanwhile, to bang the open source drum, they also didn't test Clam AV. I don't know Clam's market share, but I have to say I like it a lot for its ease of integration into my UNIXy infrastructure compared to the commercial ones I've tried, and I consider it worth testing because of its different development methodology with undoubtedly different strengths and weaknesses compared to the big commercial AV vendors.
So it's all very interesting but not entirely useful to me.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
. . . someone could find a way to get rid of its horrible "zomg hackers are after you, give us some monies" pop-up that comes up at 10:30 every tonight and alt-tabs me out of anything else I might be doing. I realize the free version is free, and apparently that pop-up ad justifies, but *must* it also alt-tab me out of games? That's pretty obnoxious.
The site seems to block direct linking...and gives you a 404. Now that's fucking stupid.
I second that motion. Let bombing begin in 10 minutes.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It's worth pointing out that when you take false positives into account Eset Nod32 becomes the only AV solution to achieve the "Advanced+" rating. Apparently it detects 20% fewer "unknown" threats but had only 7 false positives, compared with 17 for AntiVir. This places AntiVir in the same category ("Advanced") as Kaspersky, Mircosoft, Symantec, McAfee, and GData. Hopefully people bother to read the TFA, and not just this /. article
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
I'm still waiting for one of the anti-virus vendors to just start implementing a white list to cut down on the false positives.
It's not really a "virus detector" if it hits more often on non-viruses on your system. It's a "new software is being installed" detector.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I don't know, my computer has never had a virus and never will. This TRS-80 Model I Level II runs like a dream. Just have to get the hang of loading and saving programs with the tape cassette player/recorder.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
We use Kaspersky for Windows systems at work (and ClamAV on Linux for mail, though that might change to Kaspersky as I believe we have a license for it). When employees ask if they can use our licenses for their personal machines, I point them at Avira AntiVir because it's about as good and it's FREE FOR PERSONAL USE (although the free version has less spyware detection). It blows AVG out of the water.
Here are some useful links from my research, which included the above site:
From the Wikipedia links and other research that I didn't bother to note to my colleagues (who were also doing this research), I determined that Kaspersky's software was among the most efficient and CPU-friendly. It's only downside was a less-than-optimal user interface, especially on the administrative side for the corporate product. We didn't mind its UI flaws in the free trial period, so we purchased it. We're still happy with it several months later.
The main arguments for our switching from Trend Micro were that it was slow, had poor performance, missed several viruses, we wanted to boycott it, and we were tied to a very old version (since it out-performs the newer ones in reviews). Arguments for switching to Kaspersky included: it doesn't feel bloated (remember when that was the norm?), great performance, well received across the board in reviews, dirt cheap (new licenses are 70% the current renewal cost of Trend Micro, which is an ever-growing target), we liked the UI that prevented reviewers from giving it a perfect score, and it's the de-facto number one scanner in Russia and surrounding area (you know, where all the viruses come from?). Kaspersky is also growing rapidly in deployments; you can now get computers installed with it.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Do we really need yet another analysis that talks about the same exact products on the same exact platforms?
Instead of a focus on complete information security, this kind of analysis, once again, ignores BlackBerry and Macintosh and Linux - some very common platforms that are growing in both the enterprise and home markets. How a repeated focus on the most commonly discussed platform helps anyone is a mystery. It just continues to say "all these products are different, we rank them according to our exclusive analysis." Are you going to switch AV vendor given their unconvincing analysis? Not likely.
In the end, the analysis sounds hollow; "My AV software isn't on the top of their list". Given their strategy, who cares?
The self-declared "security experts" completely miss the point by completely ignoring platforms other than Windows. Sure, perhaps the BlackBerry is only found in 70% of corporate environments, and the Mac only has 7% market penetration, and Linux is perhaps only 20% of back-end servers - but I'd fathom that nearly 95% of the businesses out there use one of these platforms and need them to be SECURE - in order to keep their corporate (or personal) data and networks safe.
All these "security experts" are failing their potential customers by rehashing the same discussion, instead of analyzing products and methods that address the mostly unhandled attack vectors of other mission-critical platforms.
What about my married?
Because I can't see your married. Where did you hide it?
-- A formed babby
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Okey, I will take the time to explain it to you.
1. Set up a honeypot. Catch any number of relatively new viruses with these.
2. Use an AV product with signature files from a date before you started to capture the new viruses.
3. Tadaaa...
4. Of course... profit!
Now, was that so hard to come up with by yourself?