Whole Product Dynamic Real World Protection Test – March through June 2012

AV-Comparatives.org has released their latest Whole Product Dynamic Real World Protection Test – March through June 2012.  The advantage of this document versus a  report or blog covering a single month is that since  it covers a longer period, it  better portrays the products’ performance.  The top 5 products over this time period (you’ll have to look at the report for percentages) in order, were

1.       BitDefender
2.       G Data
3.       Kaspersky
4.       QiHoo
5.       F-Secure

All the top five had a protection rate of greater than 99%.  The top finish among the major free vendors was Avira, in eighth, out of twenty-one.  The “why did I participate in this” finishers were Ahnlab and Webroot (protection rate of 90.9%), in the twenty and twenty first positions, respectively. There’s a great interactive chart on the web site that permits you to play with time periods. Note that none of the more well known products are in the top five, with the exception of Kaspersky, who may  overtake Trend Micro this year in total revenue.

As always, this is just one test.  Individuals or companies evaluating the ability of products to detect and capture malware should visit www.av-comparatives.org , www.virusbtn.com   and www.av-test.org    to view the results of other tests.  The nice thing about these organizations is that they tend to use relatively large samples in testing, which improves the legitimacy of the results.  There is more to product quality than a number of "likes" on a Facebook fan page.

About AV-comparatives     www.av-comparatives.org

AV-Comparatives is an Austrian Non-Profit-Organization, which is providing independent Anti-Virus software tests free to the public.  Go to their website to view all the great comparative reports and surveys they publish.