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AV-Comparatives, a leading independent antivirus testing organisation, has released two sets of results evaluating antivirus security products

Malware Protection Test and Real-World-Protection Test Factsheet released

The Malware Protection Test evaluated 16 antivirus security products for their ability to protect against infection by malicious files before, during, or after execution. The test set used for this test consisted of 10,015 malware samples, with products tested in March using their latest updates on a fully up-to-date 64-bit Microsoft Windows 10 system. The products were assessed for offline and online detection rates, false alarms, and online protection rates.

McAfee, Norton, TotalAV, Avast, AVG, Avira, Kaspersky, G Data, Bitdefender, and ESET have been awarded top-level rankings based on their protection rates and false alarms.

F-Secure, Total Defense, Microsoft, K7, and Panda also received awards but at lower levels due to false alarms. Trend Micro closed the test field.

AV-Comparatives recommends that users consult other test reports, consider factors such as price, ease of use, compatibility, and support, and install a free trial version before purchase.

The Real-World Protection Test factsheet, on the other hand, evaluates antivirus software using a large number of test cases covering a wide range of current malicious sites. The test cases provide insights into the protection given by the various products while surfing the web. Over the year, several tens of thousands of malicious URLs were evaluated, and the results are based on a test set of 260 live test cases.

The interim results in this factsheet show that about half of the tested products were able to provide 100% protection so far, although some of the products reached this with a higher number of false positives. The full report, covering four months of testing, will be released in June.

It is important to note that while some products may sometimes be able to reach 100% protection rates in a test, it does not mean that these products will always protect against all threats on the web. Users are advised to always keep their system and third-party applications up-to-date/patched to dramatically decrease the risk posed by exploits and malware.

AV-Comparatives emphasizes that the Malware Protection Test complements the Real-World Protection Test, which sources malware samples from live URLs, allowing also features such as URL blockers to come into play.

Readers can find more details on the results, methodology, and ranking system in the full reports available on the AV-Comparatives website.