Free Antivirus Help Blog

     I have heard this line many times before. Is Norton better than McAfee? Is Kaspersky better than Avast? What is the best antivirus? Thankfully there are many ways to validate how an antivirus stacks up against their competitors.

      The first way is to find one of the many antivirus comparison companies and view their reports. One of my favorite is av-comparatives.org . You can view their latest report here. The company basically takes all of the well known antivirus software and runs a battery of tests on them. They use approximately 2,309,850 viruses on their test machines. They then rank each antivirus performance according to a battery of malware including backdoors, viruses, bots, and Trojans etc. The company then takes scanning times (Winners: ranked left to right, Avast, Symantec, Avira, and Sophos.), Detection Rates (Avira McAfee, Symantec, Avast then F-Secure 99.5% through 97.5%) and Missed Samples (Avira, McAfee, Symantec , and then Avast lower is better). Finally they assign an overall score with Avast, Symantec Norton, and Bitdefender ranked the highest.  McAfee is ranked in a tier below the following antiviruses. There are also four levels of certification with the av comparatives rankings depending on effectiveness.

    There are also other ranking services including WestCoast labs. This laboratory again tests an assortment of antivirus variables. Unfortunately, the company only provides two certifications platinum or a regular certification. So, Antivirus software either has a certification or it doesn’t as the company doesn’t rank antivirus software. However, it’s still good to check for WestCoast labs certified antivirus.

     Next, is ICSA labs. I like ICSA labs because they not only test antivirus but antispyware and anti spam as well. I believe that ICSA labs is one of the original malware testing services so I presume them to also have the most experience. However, the company like Westcoast labs only provides a certification rather than a ranking.

     Finally is Virus Bulletin. VB is the same as the last 2 certification companies in that they only provides a single Vb100 certification. This Vb100 certification means that the antivirus product detected 100 percent of viruses in the wild. Only 15 of the 26 security products that they tested passed. However, according to Av-comparatives no antivirus scored 100 percent detection.

      Some things that virus testing services don’t tell you. The first thing is the virus testing or comparative labs do not usually test free antivirus products. Free antivirus usually have modified code or scaled down functionality from the full versions. Therefore, you can’t say that full antivirus software and a free antivirus software detection rates are even close to similar. This is unfortunate because most antivirus these days are free antivirus. Just do a quick Google search for “antivirus” and the first program is free avg. However, don’t be discouraged. Check out av-comparatives and then make sure the software also has certifications on the other three sites listed above. This should answer most users’ questions about what is the best antivirus or what antivirus is better?

Antivirus News westcoast labs, icsa labs, av-comparatives, certifications, vb100