AV-Comparatives ranks the top proactive antivirus scanners

AV-Comparatives has released a comparison of some of the top anti-malware on the market. Note that the objective of this analysis was to identify how well antivirus scanners can detect malware using proactive scanning and heuristics methods, without the advantage of the latest virus signatures.

Samples of malware were categorized into two sets--a more recent one from the last seven months, to those from December 2007 to December 2008. Ars Technica drew up a list of the 16 antivirus products, and which saw AVIRA AntiVir Premium topping the charts with a detection rate of 74 percent, followed by G DATA Antivirus and Kaspersky AntiVirus in second and third position respectively.

Surprisingly, some well known malware scanners scored lower than expected, such as Symantec Norton Antivirus 17 with 36 percent, and McAfee VirusScan Plus 13 with 47 percent. Even more interestingly, the beta of Microsoft's free Security Essentials (MSE) tool scored 56 percent, a performance which snagged it the sixth-place position on the charts. Could this be why Microsoft decided to release its own antivirus software? An important point to note here is that while the full version of MSE was released in September, it wasn't included in this test.

After taking into account the false positives from the various products, AV-Comparatives put forth eight recommendations. Under "Advanced+" category, the eight antivirus products are: G DATA, Kaspersky, ESET, F-Secure, Microsoft, Avast, BitDefender and eScan.

What antivirus product do you use in your organization? How is your experience with them so far?

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Ars Technica

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