What's up with AV-Comparatives

Following the analogy, that is when the AV is able to detect the malware.

Damn, now I realize why the postman is afraid to ring at my door!

 

Seriously, sometimes I get in the mood for different things, too, so I know where trjam is coming from. I am staying with Kaspersky for now though, at least until I get the money to try all the others.

 

Sometimes it is a comfort to have so little knowledge that I cannot participate in these technical discussions.

Guess I will just have to keep KIS, and tremble when on the web hoping I do not get infected with things I cannot even pronounce.

Regards,
Jerry

 

Exactly! Isn't the mantra supposed to be "prevention is better than cure" for whichever AV is used? I see people have been discussing the effectiveness of cleaning up malware infections, and I agree an AV should have that ability, but we should all be trying to prevent getting infected in the first place!

 

Sure. That's why I exercise, eat right, and take my vitamins - to prevent myself from getting sick. But guess what. I still get sick every now and again and I sure hope the antibiotics the doctor gives me can "cure" my illness. Nothing is 100% and if/when something leaks in I sure want whatever AV I am using to be able to treat the infection

 

exactly, but some people are missing the point.

adding everything with little checking, and creating generic signatures for masses of viruses is just plain wrong and doesnt offer proper protection.

it may look good on testing, but fact is... this AV will have masses of FP's, using this AV would be unrealiable as you couldnt trust anything it states.

example, lets say 99% detected and 10,000 of those are not viruses, (just an example) while it may only get say 15 fps or whatever, that would 'really' make it 10,015 FPs, its really not a reliable way of protecting, and as everyone says, it will miss things, by that i mean it DOES miss things, and they dont even care about removal that much. HOW, how i ask can this be the best AV? the best protection?

sorry, but you can all throw test results at me if you wish, but i believe im right and always have been regarding their methods, and i believe the other AVs agree, as for people on this forum, some will agree and some wont, but i stand by what i believe anyway.

IBK didnt know all this?

he would have usually put something in the report regarding certain types of protection, infact im sure in the past he has used the word un-reliable before in a report, yet its not mentioned here?

but regardless of that, id still like to hear IBK comment on his 'many fps' for avs with Advanced+ rating, its not the same as what would happen with the proactive testing, there should be ****loads of STANDARD rated AV's.

 

That depends - for example - many companies still haven't invested their time to proper detection of Swizzor family. Respectable names, less than half of samples covered.

Stefan's example of difference between OnlineGames.AAAZ and .BBBA is great. It's starting to be completely ridiculous to name the tons of s....stuff coming from the internet daily. Even random names may have more information content than your example, from my point of view.

I won't even mention the cleaning part of it, that's must be meant a joke.

Tests like this show exactly what they promise to do - given 'some' set of the samples, they evaluate the capabilities of the scanning engines.

Some of you may believe that there _can_ be good av built on not-so-good engine. I don't believe in that.

 

The other way is not adding at all. Which is worse.

 

If the burglar who most likely is armed has already broken in then its just too late, he has already done enough damage and guess what, you fail to shoot him, you are history.

 

Currently only with packed files, not in general. Just take a look at latest AV-Test results or verify it by yourself.
Things change, but cut and dried opinions stay.

Cheers

 

Maybe because, in your zealously emotional bias, you've somehow overlooked the fact Avira DOES have cleaning ability?

Many people here seem to be underrating Avira's cleaning and overrating those of other antivirus software. I don't know why, perhaps it's one of those myths that just become accepted as fact after being repeated enough times. I'd worry about detecting something first anf foremost - who knows how many viruses are lurking in your machine right now while you're bashing Avira for its supposed lack of cleaning ability that you learned from hearsay.

 

Thanks, I've verified it recently with A2 Anti-Malware and their bundled Ikarus AV engine. My "cut and dried opinion" stays since nothing has changed, the number of false positives is obnoxious.

 

IBK has never penalized products for having many fp's in the February/August tests. In the report, it states that there will be penalizations next year.
If that is indeed the case, things look good for Norton and McAfee with Artemis in 2009.

 

Nope, its a consolation move to calm egos since they have just realized that the product the hate the most just won........again. They can't face the facts so they make up fictitious legend that Avira can't clean. Its total crap, tests show that not only does it detect but its cleaning abilities are as good.

Grow up people.......as I had said before, next test I hope Avira loses as then it will have these rabid fans off their back. Would that make me switch to another AV................not a chance.

 

CSJ, would you care to actually read the av-comparative PDF? How many .Gen false positives Avira had this time? And what about the other products that have more false positives than Avira this time? I write those .Gens and they are tested against several million clean files. The most massive generic rule I made detects over 230.000 samples with very little false positives. And I will continue to make such detections. The next signature cleanup (remove static detections that are covered by generics) will remove over 600.000 entries. And it could have been 800.000 easily if we had upgraded all products to the AV8 engine already.

Ikarus still has plenty of FP - on SFX mostly. Which tells you a bit about how their detection actually works...

 

Ok Stefan, what did you do to my Avatar overnight. Geez.

 

Welcome back......hope that umbrella stays as your avatar for good.

 

Well last time i used Avira on a an infected machine it detected all but cleaned none. I had to bring in the likes of SAS to remove the nasties however as preffered by most detection imo is more important then cleanage. On my own machine i never had a problem cleaning malware with Avira.

 

OT starts:
Mr. Kurtzhals, please tell me, why Avira GUI look so ugly?
Why does not have fancy GUI like some other products (with better sales rate and lower detection rate)?

 

that ones easy. They used a portrait of Stefan himself, for the model of the GUI.

 

yes, I doubt too, nobody looks that ugly...even Mr. Stefan looks prettier to malware than Avira GUI to average users money
OT ends.

 

Jeff I think your breaking your own record for chging av's over a 48 hour period , what happended to ESET?

 

nice result for av-comparatives

 

Yes, it is the best AV there is! Period.

 

TRJAM.. can I call you an AV slut?

Glad your back under the umbrella.