Panda Security, leading the protection solutions

To help give consumers a clearer idea about the state of the antivirus solution market, AV-Comparatives, the independent laboratory, regularly publishes the results of its comparative test (the ‘Real World Protection Test’). The latest edition saw some twenty security programs put through their paces by the organization on a 64-bit Windows 10 RS2 environment.

The AV-Comparatives results

Panda Security and Bitdefender managed to block all the malware

Only six solutions blocked all the malicious items: Panda Free Antivirus, Tencent PC Manager, VIPRE Internet Security Pro, Bitdefender Internet Security, Trend Micro Internet Security and F-Secure Safe.
What’s more, when this data is combined with that of false positives, only Panda Security, Tencent and VIPRE scored perfect results. As for the rest, the results of Bitdefender weren’t far away from these three solutions, with perfect results in detection, although with one false positive in scanning. Trend Micro also managed to block 100% of the threats, but the number of false threats detected was higher. On the other hand, Symantec eliminated almost all threats (99.7% blocked), in addition to 0.3% of additional threats whose detection and removal depends on the user.

Kaspersky and McAfee returned no false positives

Kaspersky, Emsisoft and McAfee, didn’t manage to block all malware, failing to detect 0.3 % of the threats, although they didn’t return any false positives.

Avast and AVG: good scores but with false positives

Avast and AVG returned the same results with respect to detection, put recorded a few occurrences of false positives.
Microsoft Windows Defender the antivirus that returned most false positives
Microsoft Windows Defender, on the other hand, scored 99.1% in detection, though was also the antivirus that detected most false positives.

Real protection test

Each antivirus solution is subjected to 316 real-time tests, consisting of, for example, exposure to malicious URLs harboring drive-by download attacks (where malware infections occur when users simply visit an infected page) and URLs that link directly to malware. In addition, file copying and saving is tested, as well as the decompressing, installation and uninstallation of the antivirus software.

AV-Comparatives also looks for possible vulnerabilities when launching programs, downloading files from the Internet, surfing the Web as well as compatibility with programs (Adobe Flash, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Java, etc.). The analysis focused on the ability of the software to “protect systems against infection by malicious files before, during or after they are run,” according to the authors of the document. Observing security systems in each of these stages offers a more holistic approach to the test, allowing analysts and users to calibrate overall security effectiveness.