PC Virus Protection 2010
A DYNAMIC ANTI-MALWARE COMPARISON TEST Products tested
Avast! Home Edition 4 AVG Free AntiVirus (8.5)
Avira AntiVir Personal – Free Antivirus (9.0) BitDefender Internet Security 2010
Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 McAfee Internet Security 2009
Microsoft Security Essentials (beta) Norton Internet Security 2010
Panda Internet Security 2010 Trend Micro Internet Security 2010
1. OVERALL ACCURACY
The Norton, Kaspersky and Trend Micro products score highly as they generally defended the system
against threats. Panda’s product was compromised the most frequently and so its score suffers
accordingly. 2. OVERALL PROTECTION
Even without weighted scores to help differentiate performance, the top three products are clearly in a separate league to the others. 3. PROTECTION DETAILS
In general the most successful products prevented threats before they could start to interfere with the system. 4. FALSE POSITIVES False positives were rare and those generated by Norton Internet Security 2010 were more advisory in tone than Trend Micro Internet Security 2010’s automatic blocking. 5. CONCLUSIONS The best-performing products were Norton Internet Security 2010, Trend Micro Internet Security 2010 and Kaspersky Internet Security 2010. These three had one notable similarity: they all blocked threats early in the attack process, which meant that there was less opportunity for the malware to infect the systems. Avast! Home Edition worked in a similar way, although it was compromised more often.
The four least effective products usually allowed the malware to start interacting with the system before they detected anything amiss. Sometimes they would detect infected files that the malware downloaded or recognize other suspicious behavior. Even when these products were able to prevent a lasting infection, some malicious files often remained on the system’s hard disk. While we did not count this as a compromise, it’s not an ideal situation. |