The antivirus industry of today devotes much effort to preventing virus infections. Various proactive technologies are developed and tested, new threat response times decrease, and detection rates increase. At the same time, the rate at which new kinds of and modifications to malicious programs appear is also rapidly increasing. As a result, no antivirus vendor can guarantee 100% protection to users. Malware infections are still quite common, and very few Internet users have not dealt with a virus at least once.
To make matters worse, virus writers keep perfecting their software. Some malicious programs are very hard to remove from the computer, because they use various methods to mask their presence in the system (including via rootkits) and to avoid detection and removal by antivirus programs.
What can be done if a computer is infected? Will an existing antivirus product cope with the problem or will it be necessary to install a competitor’s product?
In this test, we analyzed the ability of popular antivirus programs to treat active infections -- that is, when a malicious program has been executed and installed on a computer and may be using various methods to prevent detection and removal by antivirus solutions.
Testing results (February 11, 2007)
Award | Products |
1st place | Norton AntiVirus 2007 (80%) |
2nd place |
Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0 (70%) |
3rd place |
Avast! Professional Edition 4.7 (50%) Eset NOD32 Antivirus 2.7 (50%) Sophos Anti-Virus 6.0 (50%) BitDefender Antivirus 10 (50%) AVZ 4.21 (50%) |
Poor results | AVG Anti-Virus PE 7.5 (40%) McAfee VirusScan 2007 (40%) Panda Antivirus 2007 (40%) Avira AntiVir СE 7.0 (30%) Dr.Web Anti-Virus 4.33 (30%) F-Secure Anti-Virus 2007 (30%) Trend Micro PC-Cillin 2007 (30%) VBA32 Antivirus 3.11 (30%) |
* AVZ is a system analysis utility, which includes malicious program detection and removal functionality. However, it is not a fully functional antivirus solution. In the test, it was used as an antivirus scanner. |
Main results of the testing of antivirus products for the treatment of active infections in HTML»
Complete results for each antivirus product are available only in PDF or Microsoft Excel format:
Complete testing results in PDF format »
Complete testing results in Microsoft Excel format »
Comments
These results really disappoint
I believe that all products will represent better results in the next testing for the treatment of active infections, but these results really disappoint.