German Lab Tests Antivirus Programs

If you want to see just how well your antivirus program does at catching malware, German antivirus testing lab AV Test Wednesday released its most recent data for how well 29 different antivirus programs did in tests against a huge variety of active attack programs. Top performers, including Germany’s AVK 2007 and AntiVir, were able to identify the vast majority of malware (99.6 percent for AVK, and 99.4 percent for AntiVir).

Others did poorly by comparison. The worst performer, eTrust-VET, detected only 62.1 percent of malware. Microsoft’s OneCare was decidedly lackluster with an 80.6 detection rate. Symantec came in with a solid 97.8 percent, while McAfee was middle of the road with an 87.2 percent catch rate. See below for all product results.

According to AV Test’s Andreas Marx, the lab used program versions available as of May 18 and tested on both XP SP2 and Vista. They saw no difference in detection results between the OSes, however. Also, the tests were on-demand, meaning they measured how well the programs did at finding malware files already on a drive.

Some of the programs listed in Marx’s results are meant to be installed on a business network gateway, and aren’t available as consumer products. They’re marked as such on the results. Others use one or more antivirus engines developed by other companies; they’re marked as well.

Marx says the sample set of 606,901 programs represents 32-bit Windows malware active at least once within the past 12 months, and includes bots, worms, Trojans and backdoors.

PC World’s recent analysis of eight of these programs, “Virus Stoppers,” incorporated detection results from AV Test earlier in the year against a larger malware sample set. We also looked at system performance, disinfection ability, cost and a wide range of other factors to determine our standalone antivirus Best Buy, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.

Results:

1) WebWasher, 99.83 percent

(business gateway, AntiVir and own engine)

2) AVK 2007, 99.56 percent

(Kaspersky and Avast engines)

3) AntiVir, 99.42 percent

4) F-Secure, 97.93 percent

(Kaspersky and own engine)

5) Symantec, 97.77 percent

6) Kaspersky, 97.64 percent

7) Fortinet, 97.06 percent

8) Avast! 96.32 percent

9) AVG, 96.15 percent

10) Rising, 96.02 percent

11) BitDefender, 95.68 percent

12) Norman, 94.66 percent

13) Ikarus, 92.54 percent

14) Panda, 92.09 percent

15) Trend Micro, 90.97 percent

16) Nod32, 88.32 percent

17) McAfee, 87.28 percent

18) Dr Web, 85.84 percent

19) F-Prot, 85.27 percent

20) VBA32, 82.10 percent

21) Sophos, 81.75 percent

22) eSafe, 81.57 percent

(business gateway)

23) Microsoft, 80.56 percent

(applies for OneCare and ForeFront Client Security)

24) Ewido, 75.24 percent

(antispyware program)

25) VirusBuster, 72.72 percent

26) Command, 68.22 percent

(older F-Prot engine)

27) ClamAV, 63.81 percent

28) QuickHeal, 63.03 percent

29) eTrust-VET, 62.12 percent

—Erik Larkin, PC World (US)