Antivirus Testing Software

Here are the best free-and paid-antivirus programs available. We test each software’s performance, malware-detection and extra features. Antivirus Software Testing for the New Millenium Abstract: The nature of technology is changing rapidly; likewise, the nature of viral threats.

This infographic summarizes tests of Windows client antivirus software conducted by AV-TEST. The AV-TEST Institute The AV-TEST Institute The AV-TEST Institute Why the best antivirus software may not be enough Traditional signature-based antivirus is notoriously bad at stopping newer threats such as zero-day malware and ransomware, but it still has a place in the enterprise, experts say, as part of a multi-layer endpoint security protection strategy. The best antivirus products act as the first layer of defense, stopping the vast majority of malware attacks and leaving the broader endpoint protection software with a smaller load to deal with. [ Next-generation endpoint security tools are. Get the latest from CSO. ] According to a, 73 percent think that traditional antivirus is irrelevant or obsolete. 'The perception of the blocking or protection capabilities of antivirus has certainly declined,' says Mike Spanbauer, vice president of strategy and research at NSS Labs, Inc.

Plenty of recent research supports that point of view. In December 2017, security company the results of a comprehensive test of traditional antivirus.

They calculated how well a leading traditional antivirus product did at spotting zero-day threats by looking at customers who had both traditional antivirus and next-generation endpoint protection products installed. Traditional antivirus caught 9,861,318 malware variants, but it missed 3,074,534 others that were caught by a next-generation platform that used a behavior-based approach. That's a failure rate of about 24 percent. The traditional antivirus product was from AVG Technologies, a well-reviewed product. In fact, in a, AVG caught 99.6 percent of the samples tested, making it one of the top ten products on the market. Antivirus is particularly bad at catching ransomware, one of the biggest new threats that companies face. In a, anti-phishing vendor KnowBe4 found that only 52 percent of companies were able to thwart a simulated ransomware attack.

For the rest, the ransomware was able to get past their antivirus defenses. A newer threat called Process Doppelganging takes advantage of the ability of the transactions feature in Windows' NTFS file system. It allows malware to perform operations on files that make them invisible to security software. 'From a technical perspective, [our] research shows that correct file scan engines are hard to get right and specifically, that correct handling of transactions is even harder,' says Udi Yavo, a researcher at enSilo, which discovered Process Doppelganging. 'However, I think the main takeaway of this research is that having a single line of defense is not enough, and sometimes even small tricks can lead to bypasses, even in mature products. Enterprises should move to solutions that can block fileless attacks and are effective in both pre- and post-execution scenarios,” says Yavo.

NSS Labs has also been running tests of both traditional and next-generation endpoint protection tools. In its latest rounds of testing the company has focused only on vendors that have advanced detection capabilities. Last year, when testing included signature-only vendors as well, the traditional products did poorly. 'A number of products scored in the 90s,' says NSS Lab's Spanbauer, 'But none of those were sole traditional antivirus.' The problem is compounded if the new threats are designed to spread quickly in a company and do as much damage as fast as possible, and compounded again if enterprises delay rolling out antivirus updates.

In addition, the amount of malware is growing exponentially,, so even if a particular product has a high detection rate, more and more malware in absolute terms is going to slip through. Plus, if the attackers notice that a particular kind of malware is getting through, they can double-down on it. These four factors combined have helped propel the to more than 400,000 infected devices and potential total financial impact of as much as $8 billion. That doesn't mean that traditional antivirus is completely obsolete.

It still has a place in the enterprise, experts say, because it is very effective at spotting and blocking known threats quickly, efficiently and with minimum human intervention. Plus, traditional antivirus is a compliance or customer requirement in some industries. The case for traditional antivirus One company that doesn't have a choice about whether to use traditional antivirus is Emeryville, Calif.-based National Mortgage Insurance Corp. 'Our customers are banks, and many require a traditional signature-based antivirus as part of the defense we have in place,' says Bob Vail, the company's director of information security. [ Related: ] Sophos, the company’s antivirus vendor, has a good detection record, and is very light-weight, he says.

That makes it a good first round of defense, but Vail says he knows that's not enough. 'antivirus in general is going to be after-the-fact,' he says. 'Someone has to be infected and a signature developed and hopefuly everyone else gets protected before they get attacked.' The company also has a second level of protection in place to guard against the malware that gets through, a behavior-based system from enSilo. The two products work well together, Vail says. 'If a known virus comes down, Sophos will quarantine the file before it gets a chance to execute,' he says. 'But those things that get past it, enSilo will prosecute those, so it's a classic defense at depth.'

Traditional antivirus is a good adjunct to the newer technologies such as those that involve behavior analytics, sandboxing, and machine learning. The more advanced tools can require more processing power, which can slow down computers. If the product runs behavioral or other tests on potential threats before permitting user access, it can impact productivity. If the product allows the threats through, then tests them separately, malware has a window of opportunity to get access to enterprise systems.

Finally, when a new threat is detected, additional work is required to mitigate the threat and generate signatures to protect against the threat in the future. 'The first level of defense will always be some kind of signature-based defense,' says Raja Patel, VP for corporate product at McAfee LLC.

'If you already know something is bad, why do an additional layer of protection against it?' Without that initial signature-based screening, companies will have to spent a lot more time, effort and money to handle all the threats that come in, he says.

'You can image how much a security team would have to put up with.' If a threat can be caught and stopped right out of the gate, it's the cheapest option.

'Signature-based antivirus saves human effort and reduces false positives and time delays,' he says. 'It's a fantastic first layer, and will be for a long time.' Traditional, next-gen tools are converging As the industry matures, enterprises are going to be able to get the full-suite of malware protection tools from a single vendor, if they don't already. Traditional antivirus providers are adding next-gen capabilities, while the next-generation vendors are including signature-based protections in their suites.

Endpoint security startup CrowdStrike, for example, launched its all-in-one Falcon platform three years ago, allowing customers such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, DC, think tank, to get everything in one place. 'We had CrowdStrike already in place and were relying on it as part of endpoint security,' says Ian Gottesman, the organization's CIO. 'Extending that solution to include antivirus was advantageous for CSIS. I would recommend any other organizations do the same.' According to a, about 95 percent of respondents expect to see antivirus protection included in their next-generation endpoint solution. Traditional antivirus vendors aren't sitting on the sidelines, either. Instead, many are buying or building the next-generation tools that can help catch the attacks that get by signature-based defenses.

'antivirus will become extinct in the next few year unless they are able to evolve,' says Luis Corrons, PandaLabs technical director at Panda Security, a traditional antivirus vendor. 'We at Panda have been fully aware of this.' The company has been behavioral-based malware detection for several years, but even that is not enough. Many successful security breaches involve no malicious software at all, he says. 'To say it crystal clear, a traditional antivirus is useless against these attacks as there is no malware involved,' he says. For example, attackers can take advantage of existing non-malicious software.

The company has recently rolled out new tools to monitor the behavior of all active applications in an enterprise. 'It allows us to have full visibility of what is happening in our network,' he says. McAfee has also added on new layers of protection, says McAfee's Patel. 'Signature-based defenses will protect you after you know about the threats, but they won't protect patient zero and the time period after infection and when you wrote the signatures,' he says.

'We added two new protection capabilities last year -- machine learning and dynamic application containment.' Why some companies still rely on traditional antivirus alone Ransomware infection rates show that many companies still lack adequate endpoint protection. According to released late last year, nearly half of all companies fell victim to ransomware in 2016, with 70 percent of them deciding to pay the ransom. [ Related: ] Small firms are also hit, and, unlike the largest enterprise, may not be taking endpoint protection as seriously. Earlier this year, a showed that 51 percent of small and medium-sized businesses have experienced a ransomware attack, but, despite that, 57 percent says that they were 'too small' to be targets for ransomware. According to a May, 48 percent of IT managers and small and medium-sized enterprises says that a company of their size doesn't need endpoint security with advanced malware defense capabilities. That's a mistake, says NSS Labs' Spanbauer.

There are so many good options available on the market today, and very competitive pricing, that no company should be using signature-based antivirus and nothing else, he says. 'There is not a price or protection argument that can be made that would make traditional antivirus the first choice or the preferred recommendation for any specific environment.'

More comprehensive protection is easier to find than ever before, with even entry-level products offering advanced controls, he adds. 'It's hard to find a strict signature-only antivirus product these days.'

More on antivirus and antimalware: • • •.

There was a time when deciding on an antivirus solution for your PC pretty much came down to two choices: Norton or McAfee. Now, however, antivirus programs are everywhere—and many have a free version. You have your choice of Avast, AVG, Kaspersky, Panda, Trend Micro, and many others. It’s enough to make your head spin, but there’s a really easy way to figure out which antivirus program is right for you.

An independent testing organization called AV-Test spends its time figuring out the best antivirus programs for Windows, Mac, and Android users. The company publishes its results a few times a year, and for Windows users it breaks down results by operating system version. AV-Test has yet to publish any results for Windows 10 since the latest report came out in June, but you can probably rely on the Windows 8.1 results for now. A sampling of AV-Test’s June 2015 anti-virus test results.

To find out about the biggest names in antivirus, visit. Here, you’ll find a breakdown by Windows version, with each program rated on three criteria: protection, performance, and usability. The companies are listed in alphabetical order, but you can click on any of the criteria points to get a ranking based on that (performance, for example). Each category is rated on a six-point scale represented by a group of circles. More colored-in circles means a better score.

All three categories are important, but if you ask me, usability should be your top consideration, along with protection, and performance. With so many programs to choose from, and virtually all of them good, it helps to pick something regarded as user friendly. Now just look through the list to find the antivirus that meets your needs.

Note the list includes free and paid options, so you may have to do some digging if you don’t want to pay. As of June 2015, for example, Panda Free Antivirus gets really high marks and even beats many paid options for Windows 8.1—a.

Microsoft’s built-in Windows Defender, meanwhile, totally blew it on protection and performance. To dig deeper into the results, you can click on any of the antivirus programs to get a more detailed report as well as links to each company’s website to download the program of your choice. That’s about it. There are alternatives to AV-Test that you can find by searching for “antivirus rankings.” But I find AV-Test’s charts the easiest to use and the most straightforward.

Malware, Spyware, and Adware Protection If the Grinch were real, he'd be a malware coder. He wouldn't have to sneak around Whoville hoovering up all the gifts. With a banking Trojan he could drain your accounts—sorry, no money for gifts! Ransomware would let him lock up your computers until you forked over plenty of cash. And by hacking your online accounts, he could redirect your deliveries to his lair. But fear not; your antivirus utility would foil the Green One's greed.

If you don't have antivirus protection, get it now, as a gift to yourself. We can help you with shopping, as we've evaluated and reviewed more than 40 antivirus utilities. I did say antivirus, but in truth it's unlikely you'll get hit with an actual. Malware these days is about making money, and there's no easy way to cash in on spreading a virus. Ransomware and data-stealing Trojans are much more common, as are bots that let the bot-herder rent out your computer for nefarious purposes. Modern antivirus utilities handle Trojans, rootkits, spyware, adware, ransomware, and more.

PCMag has reviewed more than 40 different commercial antivirus utilities, and that's not even counting the many. Out of that extensive field we've named four Editors' Choice products. Several other commercial antivirus utilities proved effective enough to earn an excellent four-star rating. I eliminated two special-purpose products that aren't really like the rest: Daily Safety Check Home Edition and VoodooSoft VoodooShield. And Check Point's ZoneAlarm PRO uses antivirus licensed from Kaspersky, with almost no lab test results for ZoneAlarm itself. That leaves the ten excellent products you see above.

If, one of these products should do the job. All of them are traditional, full-scale, antivirus tools, with the ability to scan files for malware on access, on demand, or on schedule. As for just relying on the antivirus built into Windows 8.x or Windows 10, that may not be the best idea.

In the past, Windows Defender has performed poorly both in our tests and independent lab tests It's improving; it earneddecent scores in some recent tests. Even so, our latest evaluation indicates that you'd still be better off with a third-party solution.

Listen to the Labs I take the results reported by independent antivirus testing labs very seriously. The simple fact that a particular vendor's product shows up in the results is a vote of confidence, of sorts.

It means the lab considered the product significant, and the vendor felt the cost of testing was worthwhile. Of course, getting good scores in the tests is also important. I follow four labs that regularly release detailed reports: (the successor to Dennis Technology Labs),, MRG-Effitas, and.

I also note whether vendors have contracted with ICSA Labs and West Coast labs for certification. I've devised a system for aggregating their results to yield a rating from 0 to 10. We Test Malware, Spyware, and Adware Defenses. I also subject every product to my own hands-on test of malware blocking, in part to get a feeling for how the product works. Depending on how thoroughly the product prevents malware installation, it can earn up to 10 points for malware blocking. My malware-blocking test necessarily uses the same set of samples for months.

To check a product's handling of brand-new malware, I test each product using 100 extremely new malware-hosting URLs supplied by, noting what percentage of them it blocked. Products get equal credit for preventing all access to the malicious URL and for wiping out the malware during download. Some products earn absolutely stellar ratings from the independent labs, yet don't fare as well in my hands-on tests. In such cases, I defer to the labs, as they bring significantly greater resources to their testing. Want to know more?

You can dig in for a detailed description of. Multilayered Malware Protection Antivirus products distinguish themselves by going beyond the basics of on-demand scanning and real-time. Some rate URLs that you visit or that show up in search results, using a red-yellow-green color coding system. Some actively block processes on your system from connecting with known malware-hosting URLs or with fraudulent (phishing) pages. Software has flaws, and sometimes those flaws affect your security.

Prudent users keep Windows and all programs patched, fixing those flaws as soon as possible. The vulnerability scan offered by some antivirus products can verify that all necessary patches are present, and even apply any that are missing. Spyware comes in many forms, from hidden programs that log your every keystroke to Trojans that masquerade as valid programs while mining your personal data. Any antivirus should handle spyware, along with all other types of malware, but some include specialized components devoted to. You expect an antivirus to identify and eliminate bad programs, and to leave good programs alone.

What about unknowns, programs it can't identify as good or bad? Behavior-based detection can, in theory, protect you against malware that's so new researchers have never encountered it. However, this isn't always an unmixed blessing.

It's not uncommon for behavioral detection systems to flag many innocuous behaviors performed by legitimate programs. Whitelisting is another approach to the problem of unknown programs. A whitelist-based security system only allows known good programs to run. Unknowns are banned. This mode doesn't suit all situations, but it can be useful. Sandboxing lets unknown programs run, but it isolates them from full access to your system, so they can't do permanent harm.

These various added layers serve to enhance your protection against malware. Firewalls, Ransomware Protection, and More Firewalls and spam filtering aren't common antivirus features, but some of our top products include them as bonus features. In fact, some of these antivirus products are more feature-packed than certain products sold as security suites. Among the other bonus features you'll find are secure browsers for financial transactions, secure deletion of sensitive files, wiping traces of computer and browsing history, credit monitoring, virtual keyboard to foil keyloggers, cross-platform protection, and more.

You'll even find products that enhance their automatic malware protection with the expertise of human security technicians. And of course I've already mentioned sandboxing, vulnerability scanning, and application whitelisting. I'm seeing more and more antivirus products adding modules specifically designed for.

Some work by preventing unauthorized changes to protected files. Others keep watch for suspicious behaviors that suggest malware. Some even aim to reverse the damage. Given the growth of this scourge, any added protection is beneficial.

What's the Best Malware Protection? Which antivirus should you choose? You have a wealth of options.

Kaspersky Anti-Virus and Bitdefender Antivirus Plus invariably rate at the top in independent lab tests. In my hands-on tests, Norton AntiVirus Basic outscored every other recent product except Webroot. A single subscription for McAfee AntiVirus Plus lets you install protection on all of your Windows, Android, Mac OS, and iOS devices. And its unusual behavior-based detection technology means Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus is the tiniest antivirus around. We've named these five Editors' Choice for commercial antivirus, but they're not the only products worth consideration. Read the reviews of our top-rated products, and then make your own decision. Note that I reviewed many more antivirus utilities than I could include in the chart of top products.

If your favorite software isn't listed there, chances are I did review it. You can see all the relevant reviews on PCMag's.

All the software listed in this feature are Windows antivirus apps. If you're a macOS user, don't despair, however; PCMag has a separate roundup dedicated solely to the. Vreveal 3 Premium Keygen Generator Corel. Neil Rubenking served as vice president and president of the San Francisco PC User Group for three years when the IBM PC was brand new.

He was present at the formation of the Association of Shareware Professionals, and served on its board of directors. In 1986, PC Magazine brought Neil on board to handle the torrent of Turbo Pascal tips submitted by readers.

By 1990, he had become PC Magazine's technical editor, and a coast-to-coast telecommuter. His 'User to User' column supplied readers with tips and solutions on using DOS and Windows, his technical columns clarified fine points in programming and operating systems, and his utility articles (over forty of.