AV-Comparatives reveals top-performing consumer antivirus products in latest Malware Protection Test and Real-World Protection Test results
AV-Comparatives, a provider of independent comparative tests and reviews for antivirus products, has released the latest security software evaluation results of its Malware Protection Test for the month of March, and the factsheet for the Real-World Protection Test, carried out between February and March.
The Malware Protection Test report can be found here.
The Real-World Protection Test factsheet can be found here.
These tests examined the performance of leading antivirus solutions in order to assess their capabilities in conditions experienced every day by users around the world.
As part of AV-Comparatives ongoing Consumer Main-Test Series, the Malware Protection Test for consumer security solutions evaluated 17 popular anti-malware programs to assess their ability to detect and block malicious files before, during or after execution. This test examines a product’s ability to prevent a malicious program from making any changes to the system. The test set used for this test consisted of 10,040 malware samples, assembled after consulting telemetry data with the aim of including recent, prevalent samples that are endangering users in the field. To ensure that the tested programs do not protect the system at the expense of high false-alarm rates, a false-positive test was also run.
The products tested by AV-Comparatives were: Avast Free Antivirus, AVG AntiVirus Free, Avira Prime, Bitdefender Internet Security, ESET Internet Security, G Data Total Security, K7 Total Security, Kaspersky Internet Security, Malwarebytes premium, McAfee Total Protection, Microsoft Defender Antivirus, NortonLifeLock Norton 360 Deluxe, Panda Free Antivirus, TotalAV Antivirus Pro, Total Defense Essential Antivirus, Trend Micro Internet Security and VIPRE Advanced Security.
A total of 11 products reached the highest award level, Advanced+. These products were: NortonLifeLock, Bitdefender, Avast, AVG, Kaspersky, Total Defense, VIPRE, McAfee, Avira, Microsoft and TotalAV.
The interim results of this the Real-World Protection Test are based on a set of 362 live test cases (malicious URLs found in the field). The full report, covering four months of testing, will be released in June.
The following products (latest version available at time of testing) were tested: Avast Free Antivirus, AVG Free Antivirus, Avira Prime, Bitdefender Internet Security, ESET Internet Security, G Data Total Security, K7 Total Security, Kaspersky Internet Security, Malwarebytes Premium, McAfee Total Security, Microsoft Defender, Panda Free Antivirus, NortonLifeLock Norton 360 Deluxe, TotalAV Antivirus Pro, Total Defense Essential Anti-Virus, Trend Micro Internet Security and VIPRE Advanced Security.
The test results showed that:
- Avira achieved perfect protection with a low rate of false positives.
- AVG, Avast, ESET, Kaspersky, Microsoft and VIPRE achieved nearly perfect protection with a low rate of false positives.
- NortonLifeLock, Trend Micro and Malwarebytes achieved perfect protection, but with a high rate of false positives.
While all products in the test are unanimously viewed as successful participants, AV-Comparatives does issue caution to the products with a higher rate of false positives as it can lead to a less thorough and more time-consuming user experience.
