AV-Comparatives, provider of the world’s most thorough consumer anti-virus efficacy reports, has released its 2009 November/December study which assesses an anti-virus suite’s ability to proactively deal with new infections.
The proactive test uses two sets of samples labeled Set A and Set B. According to the company’s methodology report, Set A contains malware from December 2007 to December 2008, of which most tested products can detect at a rate of more than 97%. Set B contains 1.6 million samples from the last seven months including: Trojans (69.5%), backdoors/bots (20.7%), worms (6.1%) other malware (1.5%) and Windows viruses (0.4%).
The firm’s tests are designed to determine whether or not sixteen leading anti-virus applications can detect infections through heuristics and behavioral analysis. In other words, testing to see if anti-virus applications can accurately uncover malware without putting the user’s system at additional risk of infection.
Put to the test, AVIRA retained its leadership from 2008 as it rose to the top of the heap with a 74% detection rate. G DATA followed it at 66%, Kaspersky at 64% and ESET NOD32 at 60%.
“As it can be seen above, most products are already able to detect much completely new/unknown malware proactively. Such products can do this even without executing the malware, using passive heuristics, while other protective mechanisms like HIPS, behavioral analysis and behavior-blockers, etc. add an extra layer of protection,” the group states.
“Many new viruses and other types of malware appear every day, this is why it’s important that Anti-Virus products not only provide new updates, as often and as fast as possible, in order to identify those new threats, but also that they are able to detect such threats in advance with generic and/or heuristic techniques.”
While AVIRA was tops for accurate identification, it did get dinged for 21 false positives, which dropped it out of the running for AV-Comparative’s highest Advanced+ rating, an award no vendor received in the report. However, as a matter of perspective, 21 false positives is a rate of <0.00001%.
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