AVC-News

Here you will find links to all our test reports and reviews.

Anti-Spam Test (Consumer Products) 2016

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.

Microsoft-prevalence-based analysis of the File Detection Test

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.

Support Test 2016

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.

Vendors’ reaction to undetected malware samples

We had a closer look at the vendors’ reaction regarding the samples they missed in the online file-detection test of September.

100 days later, many of them had added detection for all missed malicious files we had sent to them after the test.

This means they now detect all threats in the test-set, resulting in a 100% detection rate with the September test-set. On the other hand, six vendors only added detection for about 90% of their misses, which results in a detection rate of between 99.2% and 99.9% of the September test-set.

To compare the reaction with that of other vendors not in our public main-test series, and who therefore do not get missed samples, we looked at how much one well-known vendor (with a similar number of misses) added in the past 100 days; it was also around 90%.

This shows that some vendors are faster at adding detection for missed malware files, and some are slower or reactive (i.e. wait till one of their users reports an infection / a missed sample to them) in adding detection for malicious samples, even if these are prevalent and confirmed as malicious. Some vendors sometimes claim that they get low scores in tests because they do not detect “non-malicious” or “non-prevalent” samples, which is thus shown not to be accurate, as they and even other vendors not taking part in tests add (albeit with much delay) missed malicious files which have been found in the field.