Daily analysis of security breach data highlights strengths and weaknesses of top brand PC security products - a real World measure of comparative antivirus protection
Posted by: Mel Morris
Never mind what your antivirus can stop, it's what it can't stop that matters
Yesterday we launched a series of new freely available daily charts showing the break down of malware we detected the previous day on PCs running top brand antivirus and PC Security products. The charts are updated around midnight GMT every day allowing you to track the performance of your specific brand of security products versus their competitors. The charts highlight some very interesting and surprising strengths and weaknesses between various brands.
To access the Antivirus Performance charts, either visit our home page and click any of the vendor names, or for information about malware detected on PCs running specific brand products you can use the following links to go straight to that vendor's chart:
Antivirus Breaches Yesterday By Antivirus / PC Security Vendor
AVG Avast Symantec / Norton McAfee Microsoft / Defender Trend Micro Kaspersky Eset NOD32 Panda Security Avira Other Security Vendors
As interest in real World metrics about antivirus and end-point security product performance grows we will add more detailed analyses and trend charts too.
Draw your own conclusions
I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions from the data, but can you spot the two vendors with the weakest protection against rootkits? Or the three vendors with the weakest detection of Targeted Information Stealing trojans? Or how much safer you would be if it was easy to run the two top performing Security products on the same PC?
Knowing your Antivirus, PC or end-point security weak spots seems kind of fundamental.
Thoughts?
4 comments so far
- James Blunt on Jun 30 18:21, 2008
- Phil Szomszor on Jul 10 13:06, 2008
- Bob on Nov 21 17:52, 2008
These antivirus charts seem to have some real depth and the information seems credible. Whatever conclusions prevx might like me to draw from these I found the data very useful showing clearly what malware my antivirus is vulnerable to vs other security products. The number of rootkit infections breaking through Symantec,McAfee,Avira,AVG and even Kaspersky is worrying though. One of these is still not stopping Rustock after several months. Thx prevx, one of your more useful charts.
Interesting charts and highlights some product weaknesses in your competition.
Part of the problem, though, is that the vast majority of consumers - even the relatively tech-savvy ones - don't understand the security landscape.
So, whilst we're getting to a point where consumers recognise the need for some projection, the vast majority think that once they've installed, say AVG, they're completely protected. As for understanding the nature of rootkit infections, well....
Funnily enough I don't see a chart showing the malware that prevx missed but the other vendors detected. Willy waving is all well and good but in this day and age it is nothing more than a dirty marketing trick IMO. All the vendors are guilty of it to some extent and they should stop it, because they all know- including you prevx, that 0day detection of all threats is impossible at this point in time.
Bob
Hello,
Are the results from scans using your own (Prevx) products also available for comparison? That would be beneficial.
Thanks,
Tom