av-comparatives news

I see excuses are already being rolled out in some antivirus forums.

 

I can't see the reports . Where are they?

 

www.av-comparatives.org

 

Now, the results of August are online

 

It seems that the test was done with Avira PersonalEdition Premium. That one is not free. IBK, would Avira Personal Classic provide the same on-demand protection?

 

I can see now. IMO most surprising is Norman. I am waiting v.6 after this results.

 

Polymorphic test results are somehow confusing. 0% can mean that AV missed the samples or it means it detected it with some sort of higher level of detection (heuristics, family detection or something). But in the end there is no info whether some specific AV detected that sample (just not with exact match) or it missed it for real... Both is counted as 0%. That kinda sux... It's certanly a difference when something gets detected (even if not exact match) than completelly missed...

 

That will occur, but there's really no need for anyone to feel defensive about the results. My own summary read:

• The top tier products (Advanced & Advanced+) has expanded a bit. Everyone has some additional options from this pool of very high performers.
• When I look at Section 3 of the full report (time based addition of samples missed on the last test), there are some real standouts (F-Prot, Norman, Avast, Avira). It's clear all four are serious in improving, with fruit already borne by Avira. Bitdefender had a good start here, then seemed to go static. Not sure what's up with AVG, Dr. Web, Panda.
• If you break it out according to change in detected % from the last test (not including DOS viruses), that comparision comes out Avira (+3.32%), AVK (-0.16%), Avast (+2.77%), AVG (+1.22%), BitDefender (+2.13%), Dr Web (+0.95%), F-Prot (+3.27%), F-Secure (-0.51%), KAV (-0.51%), McAfee (-4.01%), NOD32 (+0.72%), Norman (+8.76%), Norton (+0.52%), TrustPort (+1.34%), VBA (+4.06%). If I were to set an arbitrary threshold of 1% as differentiating improved (> +1.0%), steady (between +/- 1.0%), and slipping (< -1.0%), the biggest surprise for me is McAfee, that was a sizeable step back. You can move that threshold around a bit, but it's difficult to change that view.
• Everyone should bear in mind, as a product gets closer to 100%, the likelihood of minor drops increases. It's a mathemathical certainty.
• I still believe that the most critical results from this test for a consumer are the categorical ratings (Advanced+/Advanced/Standard).

Blue

 

As far as detecting viruses and trojans, yes. This is what the premium edition offers:

AntiSpyware: protection against dangerous spy programs
AntiAdware: bothersome adware programs
Email scanner: extra protection against email viruses (POP3)
Premium updates: updating at lightning speed through an exclusive update server
Configurable search runs: examination of selected folders and files

 

The winner of this test is the AntiVir!

Excellent work from the AVIRA team!
Unfortunately the free version of AntiVir doesn't have the same detection if we add the adware/spyware detection...

avast! still needs a lot of work to be on top...

Thanks for all your excellent work, IBK!

 

Yes I found that list. It is still a question whether the AntiSpyware or AntiAdware component is adding to the on-demand detection rates. Which would mean that Personal Classic would have lower score.

 

geez avira and symantec..rather have Avira

 

I am currently also not able to reach the new pages etc. uploaded today. It is probably a problem from the webhoster/server, i think we should just be patient (maybe they were not prepared to this huge traffic ).

 

spyware and adware samples are not included in the test-sets.

 

Quick, and hopefully simple question. Is AOL AVS Freeware capable of achieving the same detection scores KAV got, without having the Web, and Proactive features? And if not, would AVS still be closer to KAV's detection than Antivir PE is to their Premium Edition because of AVS having spyware detection?

 

Good work, IBK! Interesting read!

AVIRA is certainly doing great! The Frisk team seems to be working hard with their F-Prot also; the number of missed samples seems to be decreasing a lot.

 

fprot v4 scores much better than v3. a comparison between those two will be done soon.

 

Well, here's mine. I am responsible for the macro malware scanning engine in F-PROT. According to the latest test results, our scanner has missed 5 samples of macro malware. Meanwhile Andreas has sent us the missed samples and I have analyzed those of them relevant to the macro scanner. My conclusion is as follows:

1) One sample is a new (unknown) W97M virus - a variant of the Xaler family. When I say "unknown", I really mean unknown to the industry. (We have a mailing list where we announce all new macro malware and this one had not been announced there by anyone.) It's fine to use such stuff to test heuristic detection but its place is not in a known-virus test set. Meanwhile, I have implemented detection of this virus.

2) The remaining 4 samples were not macro malware. They were script (StarBasic) malware.

3) All of them were new, unknown variants of SB malware.

4) All of them were not proper samples. StarOffice keeps its documents as sets of various files in what is essentially a ZIP archive. If the document contains any StarBasic programs, they are stored in separate XLM files in this archive. The samples were just these XML files extracted - not StarOffice documents. They would not run if opened with a StarOffice application. While this does not matter to our scanner (which missed them because of item #3), it might matter to other products. The place of such samples is not in a proper virus test set.

5) At least half (2) of these 4 samples were trivial modifications of non-viruses (Intended; see my paper in the August issue of Virus Bulletin). These modifications would not have made a virus out of it. The place of such samples is definitely not in a virus test set. Of the remaining 2, one is almost certainly a virus (albeit a new variant) and the other might be a virus - at least analysis suggests so but I don't have StarOffice right now and can't check for sure.

I can't comment on the other samples our scanner has missed, since I haven't looked at them and I'm not responsible for the part that ought to detect them anyway.

Regards,
Vesselin

 

Surprised to see McAfee's performance with the new 5100 engine. McAfee claims that the new 5100 engine provides Elevated Protection, but the performance is somewhat disappointing.

 

would you have told me this 5 hours ago or during last 7 days, i would have removed those 4 staroffice files from the set :/. anyway, thanks, will remove them from the set for the future. fortunatly, the 0.01% in the macro set does not make a really big difference.

 

well of course I have to say well done to antivir. so cheap yet better score than even kaspersky.

and antivir maybe be secound but it is using a two engine system so it would be better imo.

whihc forums are people already making excuses on?


lodore

 

About McAfee: their detection rate is currently not as high as usually, because McAfee is currently more focussing on detection quality than quantity, since the last big false alarm occured some months ago.

about the excuses: they are not excuses, it is just what I always tell you -> do not look at the xx,xx percentages, look on the levels.

 

its true. the results are shocking. KAV is dethroned and Antivir is rising to power.

 

yup sure are. i installed antivir pm on my sister laptop two days ago now im glad i did. and may put it on my laptop.

 

Avira AntiVir PersonalEdition Premium is now in beta with a added firewall. They really did a good job.