Top Antivirus Report 2014

The antivirus tool has many different opportunities to protect your PC from attack. It can totally block access to a malicious URL, wipe out the downloaded code on sight, recognize and prevent malicious behavior, even roll back the system changes made by a malware attack. It’s easy to create a lab test that checks just one of these layers, for example, the ability to block malicious URLs or recognize malware by signature. Such a test is informative, but doesn’t give the whole picture. AV-Comparatives runs a continual Real-World Protection test that lets each antivirus use all of its weapons against live malware. The latest summary of this test’s results reveals a broad range of effectiveness.

Winners
Nine products successfully protected against 99 percent or more of the samples. Eight of them, including Bitdefender and Kaspersky, earned the top rating, Advanced+. Due to false positives, F-Secure got knocked down one rank to Advanced.

Avast and Baidu made impressive comebacks. In the previous summary, both failed to achieve even the Standard rating. This time around Baidu rated Standard and Avast rose to Advanced.

Losers
AV-Comparatives ran this test under Windows 7, and included the optional Microsoft Security Essentials as a baseline. Had it been given an official rating, it wouldn’t have reached the Standard level. Along with AhnLab and ThreatTrack VIPRE, Microsoft rated merely Tested.

McAfee, Trend Micro, and eScan all earned Advanced+ in the previous report. This time around they would have rated Advanced based solely on detection rate, but false positives dragged all three down to a Standard rating.

Source: pcmag.com