Some of the biggest names in the security industry have failed the latest Virus Bulletin 100 test. The test used 100 pieces of malware collected from active samples and put them up against a number of major security suites for Windows Server 2008.Only 16 of the 24 products pitted against the test passed, while eight fell short owing to missed malware samples or false positive returns. Most of the major vendors, including McAfee, Symantec, Microsoft and Sophos, were able to pass the test. However, several others, including F-Secure, Kaspersky and Computer Associates, fell short of the certification.
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I think that the nature of virus scanning makes this a dynamic list. It is probably important to select an AV supplier that is consistently good. Plus, I would take two false positives over two missed viruses any day.
http://www.microsoft.com/forefront
OneCare scored a 100 in April 2008, on Vista SP1
Really, it is very easy to register there, and I get zero spam (or email updates) from them.
i use avira now and between 3 processes it is using a total of just over 10MB.. i'd say it's as good as it gets tbh, because i used NOD32 before avira and it was lightweight in my opinion but typically used 3-4x the memory. i'd stick with avira IMO.
I use OneCare and it seems fine... I don't notice any difference in resource usage between it and Avira.
(like EcPercy I'm not registered on there either)
However I've been a NOD32 user for the past 2 years and while I think its detection rate is pretty good its ability to clean is a whole different story
Its ability to clean? I thought it was excellent tbh. In fact, it did "too good" of a job once, it cleaned a virus which had changed the registry for explorer, which stopped it from loading. Easy fixed though.
I'll have to have a look around when my subscription runs out next year (bought a 2yr sub last time).
This VB100 comparative review was for Microsoft Windows 2008, so if anti-malware companies offered both consumer and business products, the business products were used. Keep in mind that in tests like these, what is being tested is a particular version of a malware signature database. It is likely that if the test were run with a program's previous or next database that the results would differ.
Part of the criteria for receiving a VB100 award is that the anti-malware program cannot report a false positive alarm of malware when scanning a clean set of files. Avira AntiVir and Kaspersky Anti-Virus both had a single false positive report against different files in the clean set . Otherwise, the programs performed excellently on other parts of the review.
While looking at false positive alarm rates are important when evaluating anti-malware software, especially in an enterprise environment where such events lead to a swamped helps desk and users being locked out of their computers, but they are not the only criteria by which anti-malware software is judged. Things like detection rate, performance with frequently-used applications, manageability and availability/quality of support are important, too.
Anti-malware programs are not perfect, and they are going to generate a false negative (miss detection of malware when it is present) and false positive (detect malware when it is not present) reports from time to time. Making a decision based off of a single test result is not good research.
Where individual reviews such as Virus Bulletin's are very useful, they become even more so when looked at over time. If the test methodology is good, you can get a good idea of product quality by graphing the measurements from the tests used in the reviews over time . You might even find out some interesting things about a product that are not apparent from looking at just a single review.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
VB100 is one of the poorer measures of anti-virus software as it tries to give software that inherently has graduated results a single rating, pass or fail.
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