How Does Your Anti Virus Software Stack Up?

January 28, 2015 mitch tanenbaum

Redmond Mag is reporting that AV-Test has ranked 28 Anti Virus software products against 153 pieces of zero day (meaning previously unknown) and 12,000+ pieces of known malware.

AV-Test, based in Germany, has gotten sideways with Microsoft before. Microsoft has come in ranked very low on their tests several times.

Microsoft says that the firm ranks anti virus software based on how well it detects malware. Microsoft says they prioritize “real world malware uses”. I guess that means that they only worry about the major pieces of malware.

Microsoft’s product is free and unfortunately, this may be one case where you get what you pay for. In 2013, Microsoft said that most of the malware that they didn’t stop either didn’t hurt users or wasn’t out there in the wild.

Anti virus software is pretty cheap. Trend Micro, one of the vendors that scored 100 percent on the test, is available today on Amazon for $25 for 3 PCs (per year). That would work out to $8 and change per PC at home if your family has several computers.

What I don’t know is whether the reason that Microsoft says that their users don’t see the malware that they don’t detect because that malware is not common or because they don’t detect it, hence Microsoft does report it as being found on user’s computers?

In any case, to me, if I could get something that detects all 12,000+ samples for $8 per computer per year – the cost of 1 or 2 Starbucks – that sounds like a reasonable expense.

The three anti virus products that scored 100 percent in their tests are: