Independent testing institute AV-Test of antivirus products for Windows 8.1. The rating compared their performance from March to April 2014.
Antivirus reviews may be outdated at this point, as there are already publications circulating that say the end of security software is coming. These publications may be somewhat exaggerated, but they describe the landscape very well. The most correct way to look at it is that antivirus is not, and never will be, an adequate means of protecting the user from attacks. But, for most users, it is still an important first line of defense.
The cutting edge of the market for said defense is now in Windows 8.1, the operating system that most new computers come with.
The independent testing institute AV-TEST evaluated 25 of these consumer products and nine business products and found that most of them were very effective in blocking both known malware (20,646 samples) and unknown malware (138 samples). The number of products that detected 100% of these threats in the tests conducted by AV-TEST, conducted from March to April. The charts are provided by the AV-TEST Institute.
It's hard to know how successful enterprise security software is, given that businesses are still avoiding Windows 8.x. But according to AV-TEST, they're not avoiding the operating system because of the quality of the AV. Six of the nine products (Bitdefender Endpoint Security 5.3, G Data Security Client 13.0, Kaspersky Lab Endpoint Security 10.2, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.1, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise with EPO 8.8, and F-Secure Client Security 11.50) blocked 100 percent of threats in both March and April. A seventh product, Trend Micro Office Scan 10.6, found 99 percent of the unknown malware tested in March, and 100 percent in April.
The vast majority of consumer anti-malware products detected 100 percent, or very close to it, of the unknown malware tested. Only three of the 25 (Tencent PC Manager 8.5, Microsoft Windows Defender 4.3 & 4.4, and AhnLab V3 Internet Security 8.0) detected less than 94 percent of the unknown malware. A new product in the tests was Check Point ZoneAlarm Extreme Security version 13.0.
Of the nine enterprise products, only Bitdefender Endpoint Security 5.3 received a top performance score. The other products experienced false positives and warnings, but they were so few that AV-TEST gave all nine top performance scores. The highest overall score, a perfect 18.0, went to Bitdefender.
Of the consumer products – Kaspersky Lab Internet Security 2014, Qihoo 360 Internet Security 4.2, Kingsoft Antivirus 2013, and Tencent PC Manager 8.5 – had the top performance results. Some of the others, such as Panda Security Cloud Antivirus FREE 2.3, ThreatTrack VIPRE Internet Security 2014, and PCKeeper Antivirus Pro 1.0, also performed quite well in this test. Top scores were given to 20 of the 25 products.
Source: secnews.gr
