Annti-Virus Comparison

[IronPC]

Anti-Virus Comparison

I have spent a few days comparing different anti-virus products and posted a blog about the results on my website. I would like to share this with you guys but I have not posted enough to post a link yet so I guess if anyone wants the link you can pm me until I get 15 posts.

Edit: http://www.ironpcsolutions.com/blogs/10-different-anti-virus-solutions-compared.html

Here is a quick overview though:

I tested the following products:

• Avast (Free Version - 5.0.545)
• AVG (Free Version 9.0.819)
• Avira (Free Version 10.0.0.567)
• BitDefender (Anti-virus 2010 Trial Version 13.0.21.347
• Comodo (Free Version 4.0.141842.828)
• Kapersky (anti-virus 2010 Version 9.0.0.736)
• McAfee (Enterprise Paid Version 8.7i)
• Microsoft Security Essentials (Version 1.0.1961.0)
• Norton (Internet Security Trial Version 17.6.0.32)
• Trend Micro (Internet Security Trial Version 17.50.1647)

I chose 50 links (all working at the start of the first test) from malwaredomainlist.com in five different categories to test in. I have graphs showing the results in each category as well as graphs showing the overall results.

Some of the results surprised me and some didn't. I hope this might be useful to you guys as well.

 

[Larry Sabo]

You can post the link as text, e.g., with spaces between letters or words.

Why do you think your tests are more reliable or believable than those of, say, av-comparatives or Anti-Malware Test Lab?

Edit: ... or Virus Bulletin.

 

[IronPC]

You can post the link as text, e.g., with spaces between letters or words.

Why do you think your tests are more reliable or believable than those of, say, av-comparatives or Anti-Malware Test Lab?

Not sure why I did not think of that. Could be all of the sinus/allergy medication I am on.

As far as more reliable or believable, I don't think they are either. It is just something I wanted to do personally and I wanted to share my results with others. These are no where near exhaustive either in terms of products tested or how they were tested.

 

[keeperofthecode]

Wow. Your results are kind of confusing but I'm impressed by your drive to produce the data. I'm sure that consumed more time than any of us realize. I checked out the sites listed by Larry also and I couldn't believe the difference in results that each site showed overall. AV Comparatives seemed to have much clearer results but the other goes into much more detail. I think I'm going to have to give Avira a second chance. I used it once before and ditched it a couple of days later. Second, I've never even heard of G Data but I guess it deserves my attention. Thanks to both of you for passing on the good info.

 

[MrUnknown]

great work you put in there. I would have liked to see ESET as part of the comparison, but I am sure this comparison took you long enough.

I was very surprised to see that Trend Micro and Avast did so well. I still like my Kaspersky.

 

[iptech]

A lot of work there, are you going to keep this updated or was it a one-off exercise? I would also add the full consumer name of the product (e.g. Norton Antivirus 2010) rather than just the revision number.

 

[MobileTechie]

Good effort mate.

This led me to have a another look at the two comparitive sites linked to earlier in this thread. I must say that despite it's popularity here MSE doesn't fair all that well in any of the tests: for boot time, file transfer speed, zero-day exploits (but then non of the plain AVs do well in that).

Whilst Avira tops the detection rates and some speed test, in terms of blocking zero-day malware it was not so good. KIS does well above average in all tests and very well with zero-day stuff. So overall it seems that is a very good choice for overall.

DefenseWall scored 100% against zero-day malware. I notice you can buy it in bulk at a good discount. If you buy 10 you get it at less than half and list price. Might be worth looking into for customers with repeated infection problems (i.e. teenage children).

 

[IronPC]

A lot of work there, are you going to keep this updated or was it a one-off exercise? I would also add the full consumer name of the product (e.g. Norton Antivirus 2010) rather than just the revision number.

It was planned as a one-off, but if there is enough interest I could do something like this yearly with additional products.

I will add the full name of the product too. Thanks for the tip.

 

[Puff]

Excellent work! I'm curious though. It looks like in some tests (if I'm reading the results correctly) a system with no antivirus did better than a system with AV installed. What was it that an installed AV changed or disabled on the system that caused this to occur? You would think that and AV solution would make a system more secure instead of more vulnerable.

 

[IronPC]

I really need to clarify that more.

Essentially all the graphs except for the very last one show only what the av product blocked. If the av product did not block it, but Windows did, it was not included. Then in the last graph I show a combination of what the av product blocked, but also what Windows blocked (if the av product missed it). This becomes more evident in the notes in my spreadsheet.

 

[Puff]

A bit confusing but still, fantastic work and when you do your own research you always learn something new and that helps you provide a better service to your customers.

Great job and thanks for sharing your research with the community.