New Antivirus Shootout from Av-Test.org

Earlier this week AV-Test.org – a reputed antivirus software testing group, released the results of their latest Antivirus shootout. In this test only detection abilities were tested, not cleaning. Over 600,000 malware samples (which included backdoors, Trojan Horses, bots and worms) were used to test twenty nine software. The top ten performers were :

Software – Detection Rate

AVK 2007 – 99.56%
AntiVir – 99.42%
F-Secure – 97.93%
Symantec – 97.77%
Kaspersky – 97.64%
Fortinet – 97.06%
Avast! – 96.32%
AVG Anti-Malware – 96.15%
Rising – 96.02%
BitDefender – 95.68%

(Actually WebWasher was the top performer with a detection rate of 99.83% however I have ignored it because it is not available for desktops)
Detailed report is available here.

AVK and AntiVir emerged as the winners. In the most recent test carried out by Av-comparatives.org also they had performed very well. The Top Five based on the tests carried out by Av- Compratitives were Trustport, AVK, Antivir, F-Secure, and Kaspersky.

Recently, Virus.gr also had carried out their own antivirus shootout. I am not including those results here, as virus.gr is known to be unreliable. You can read my analysis on Virus.gr test results here.

G DATA AntiVirusKit (AVK) uses two of the best engines in the market – Kaspersky and Bitdefender. This explains its excellent performance. However, I am not a big fan of double engines since they are often resource hogs. AntiVir from Avira continues to impress. I have always considered Avira AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic to be one of the best free antivirus software. But, based on these results it is safe to say that Avira is the best antivirus software – free or paid.

Most disappointing for me was Nod32’s performance. It is widely believed to possess the best engine. Its database has always been slightly weak, however I definitely expected it to detect more than 88.32% of the malware. Kaspersky’s performance also has dipped slightly in recent times. While Symantec delivered, other much hyped products like Microsoft One Care and McAfee fell flat. In fact they got beaten badly by Avast! and AVG. It should be noted here that freeware editions of Avira AntiVir and AVG would have got lower scores since they do not include spyware and adware protection.

Conclusion : Based mainly on the tests done by Av-test.org and Av-comparitives.org I recommend the following products :

Paid : i) Avira AntiVir PersonalEdition Premium
ii) Kaspersky Antivirus

Free (for Personal Use) : i) Avira AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic
ii) AOL Antivirus Shield

How did your antivirus software perform? Are you satisfied with the product you are using?