See how your anti-virus program stacks up
In my April 2007 Editorial [1] I rated some of the most popular free and commercial AV scanners. Since then I’ve located an excellent additional data source [2] for assessing AV performance. It’s a near real-time listing of how well the major scanners detect new threats identified by the Malware Incident Reporting & Termination (MIRT) team. The results support my previous findings namely the class-leading new threat detection rate of AntiVir and the relatively poor performance of AVG and Avast! with Kaspersky and NOD32 falling in the middle. Perhaps more important than the product ranking, is the relatively poor performance of ALL products in detecting new threats. This reinforces the point I have been making in recent issues that you can no longer rely exclusively on signature based anti malware products to protect you from the current onslaught of new threats. That said, it should be noted that the detection of new threats is only one of several criteria you need to consider when assessing the performance of AV products. See my April [1] editorial for more details.
[1] http://techsupportalert.com/issues/issue144.htm#Section_0
[2] http://winnow.oitc.com/malewarestats.php

Related posts:

  1. Free anti-virus program shines
  2. Selecting the right anti-virus product
  3. Anti-spyware products compared
  4. SpySweeper now available with anti-virus scanner
  5. The best free anti-virus scanner
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All Windows Secrets articles posted on 2007-12-13: