Spam can be defined as unsolicited emails sent en masse. These may be sent for advertising purposes, in which case they may be seen as irritating but harmless. They may attempt to deceive the recipient into sending money to the scammer; typical examples are pretending to be a friend or relative who has lost their wallet while abroad, and so needs money to get home, or claiming that by paying a relatively small administration fee, the recipient will receive a much larger sum as lottery winnings. Other malicious spam emails may contain links to phishing pages or malware, or simply include malware as an attachment.

In this first Anti-Spam Test Report, AV-Comparatives had a look at 13 consumer anti-spam products for their ability to filter out spam emails.

This Microsoft-prevalence-based analysis report is supplementary to AV-Comparatives’ main report, already published, of the March 2016 File-Detection Test. No additional testing has been performed; rather, the existing test result have been re-analysed from a different perspective, to consider what impact the missed samples are likely to have on customers, according to telemetry data of Microsoft.

Microsoft commissioned this supplementary report. In this report, customer impact is measured according to prevalence. Essentially, some malware samples pose a greater threat to the average user than others, because they are more widespread. An impact heatmap can be found on https://impact.av-comparatives.org

More information can be read also in this here.

Given the numerous risks to be found on the Internet today, effective antimalware software is essential when going online. If a user is unable to install or activate their security program, or it is not working as expected, rapid help from an expert is called for. Arguably the quickest way of getting assistance is to pick up the phone and speak to one of the manufacturer’s support agents. The aim of Support Tests is to assess how quickly and effectively the vendor’s support services cope with typical questions.

You can find the evaluation reports for the phone support in UK and Germany.

The March 2016 file detection test report has been released. As usual, please read carefully the whole test report. You can find it on our website. The False Alarm lists are here.

The report of our latest annual security survey is now available here!