A new evaluation of the Independent Testing Institute was released AV-Test for product virus protection for Windows 8.1. The evaluation compared their performance from March to April of 2014.
Antivirus reviews may be out of date at this point, as there are already publications stating that the end of protection software is coming. These posts may be a bit exaggerated but they describe the landscape very well. The most correct way to look at it is that antivirus is not, and can never be, an adequate means of protecting the user from attacks. But, for most users, is still an important frontline defense.
The edge of the market for this defense is now in Windows 8.1, the operating system with which most new computers come.
The independent testing Institute AV-TEST's assessment of 25 of these products for consumers and nine for businesses shows that most of them are very effective in blocking known malware, (20,646 samples) but also unknown (138 samples). The number of products that detect 100% of these threats in AV-TEST's tests, conducted from March to April. Charts provided by AV-TEST Institute.
It's hard to know how successful enterprise security software is, given that businesses are still shying away from Windows 8.x. However, according to AV-TEST they do not avoid the operating system because of the quality of the AV. Six of the nine products (Bitdefender Endpoint Security 5.3, G Data Security Client 13.0, Kaspersky Lab Endpoint Security 10.2, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.1, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise with EPO 8.8, and F-Secure Client Security 11.50) blocked 100 percent of threats in both March and April. A seventh product, the Trend Micro Office Scan 10.6 found 99 percent of unknown malware tested in March, and 100 percent in April.
The vast majority of consumer anti-malware detected 100 percent, or very close to it, of the unknown malware tested. Only three out of 25 (Tencent PC Manager 8.5, Microsoft Windows Defender 4.3 & 4.4, and AhnLab V3 Internet Security 8.0) detected less than 94 percent of unknown malware. A new product in testing was Check Point ZoneAlarm Extreme Security version 13.0.
Of the nine business products, Bitdefender Endpoint Security 5.3 only got a top performance score. Other products have seen false positives and warnings, but were so few that AV-TEST gave all nine the top score for performance. The highest total score was a perfect 18.0, and went into Bitdefender's product.
From consumer products - Kaspersky Lab Internet Security 2014, Qihoo 360 Internet Security 4.2, Kingsoft Antivirus 2013, and Tencent PC Manager 8.5 - have had top performance results. Some of the others like Panda Security Cloud Antivirus FREE 2.3, ThreatTrack VIPRE Internet Security 2014, and PCKeeper Antivirus Pro 1.0, did quite well in this test. Top scores were given to 20 of the 25 products.
