Testing of proactive antivirus protection
The industry has recently witnessed a shift in emphasis to so-called proactive methods of antivirus protection, which allow antivirus software to combat malicious programs that have undergone modifications and those that are as yet unknown. This development trend is the most promising on the market and almost every developer likes to emphasize just how good their proactive defense is.
There are even attempts to contrast the newer proactive technologies with the older reactive technologies that use signature-based methods to detect malware and that require continuous and rapid updates of antivirus databases.
The concept of proactive protection is, of course, extremely attractive: a virus hasn’t even appeared and already there is protection against it. But the question arises as to just how effective these technologies are.
It should be noted that proactive technologies encompass a broad range of concepts and approaches, and including them all within the framework of a single test is simply not feasible. In this test we will only compare the heuristic components of antivirus protection (heuristic + generic detection, i.e., extended signatures), without taking into account an analysis of system events (behavior blockers or HIPS).
The results of the test make it possible to say how effective a heuristic analyzer is and in which antivirus product this component performs the best.
As an addendum, a final measurement of the detection level for the collection of malware samples was performed on the updated antivirus software a week after the main test. As a result, the quality of detection for new viruses, as well as the effectiveness of the classical signature-based method of each antivirus program was ascertained in addition to their heuristics.
Latest test results (14/01/2008)
| Award | Products |
 Gold Proactive Protection Award Download GIF image (500х500px) |
Avira AntiVir Personal Edition Premium 7.0 (71%) BitDefender Antivirus 2008 (65%) |
| ESET NOD32 Anti-Virus 3.0 (59%) Dr.Web 4.44 (57%) Sophos Anti-Virus 7.0 (56%) Avast! Professional Edition 4.7 (52%) VBA32 Antivirus 3.12 (48%) Kaspersky Anti-Virus 7.0 (45%) McAfee VirusScan Plus 2008 (43%) |
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|
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Symantec Anti-Virus 2008 (38%) AVG Anti-Virus Professional Edition 7.5 (37%) F-Secure Anti-Virus 2008 (36%) Trend Micro Antivirus plus Antispyware 2008 (30%) Panda Antivirus 2008 (20%) |
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Failed
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Agnitum Outpost Security Suite 2008 (12%) |
Key results from the proactive antivirus protection test in HTML»
Complete results for each antivirus product are available only in HTML (click on the link above).
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Comments
Outpost security suite 2008
i note your comment about the suite not having a heuristic option, it does, it's under anti-malware settings, use the customize button.
what version did you use? must have been an early beta, please test current versions, not old obsolete ones. this is from the current v. 6.0.2284 build, tho i think the heuristics option was there in the christmas edition released in early december. please check the option is turned on, hard to test it if it is not.
Outpost security suite 2008 has a heuristic option
kronckew, you didn't understand the conclusion from testing results. I meant Outpost security suite 2008 has heuristic but it's absolutely useless. It looks like a fake option.
This fact is equal to they don't have it at all :-)
ouch, "its like a fake
ouch, "its like a fake option"
funny, so i guess people should not rely on catching those new virii with outpost suite.
i must admit, i have tried it and it wasnt a favourite of mine.
some companys should stick to what they know, Firewalls.