Dennis Labs Test Brings Joy to Antivirus Vendors

When choosing an antivirus product, you naturally want to pick one that will give you the best real-world protection. It's nice to know that product X recognized 99 percent of a million static samples, but that doesn't necessarily tell you how it will handle a brand-new malicious website. Researchers at Dennis Technology Labs do their best to emulate real-world situations in their testing, and their latest report brings tidings of joy for all the products tested. Read on to see if your own favorite was among those tested and certified.

History Repeats
Websites hosting malicious code are by far the biggest source of malware attacks. Dennis's researchers scour the web to locate real-world malicious pages. However, malware coders are cagey. They'll often configure the malicious code on a page to lay low most of the time, only attacking a small portion of visitors.

In order to ensure that each antivirus product encounters the exact same attack, the researchers capture the entire Web interaction and related data. This lets them replay exactly the same attack for each product being tested. Kaspersky earned a perfect score, fully defending against all attacks. Norton came close, neutralizing one and defending against all the rest.

Two-Way Scoring
As long as the antivirus product neutralizes infestation by a particular attack, it earns one point. If it also wiped out all hazardous traces, it gets two points. A product that completely prevented the attack earns three points, the top score. If it failed to detect the malware, or failed to prevent infestation, it loses five points.

Of course, it would be possible for an antivirus to crank up its detection rate by going over-aggressive to the point where it identifies some legitimate software as malicious. The researchers check for that possibility too, using about 100 legitimate programs. They weight false positives based on how prevalent they are and how severe a problem the mistake caused. F-Secure, the "guest" vendor in this test cycle, lost the most points due to false positives. Kaspersky and AVG AntiVirus Free didn't flag any legitimate programs as malware.

Good Scores for All
Dennis Labs offers certification at five levels: AAA, AA, A, B, and C. AVG earned A-level certification, while Kaspersky, Norton, and ESET topped out with AAA-level certification. All the rest came in at the AAA level—no B or C ratings this time.

I can't tell you how much I appreciate the independent labs that take the trouble to closely simulate real-world user situations in their testing. It's not easy! You can view detailed full results online.