14 DAY TRIAL // If you're in the market looking for a truly powerful security product, the engineers over at Dennis Technology Labs could help you pick the one that can really protect your computer.
A new series of tests published by the institute reveals that Kaspersky Internet Security 2014 is the best anti-virus on the market right now, as it protected 100 percent of all computers involved in the research, with a legitimate accuracy and total accuracy of 100 percent.
Norton Internet Security comes second with a protection rate of 99 percent, followed by ESET Smart Security 7 and McAfee Internet Security with 97 percent and 99 percent respectively (the latter, however, achieved lower scores in accuracy tests).
Dennis says that Avast! Free Antivirus 9 was the most effective freeware security product, followed by AVG Free Antivirus 2014. “They were both compromised eight times but AVG scored lower as it neutralized many threats while Avast!’s product blocked them instead,” the expert said in the results.
At the same time, the tests revealed that some of the anti-virus solutions currently on the market are leaving almost every decision on the user in the front of the screen, asking for the appropriate action whenever a new threat is detected.
“Most of the products would delegate some decisions to users when installing legitimate software. Products from McAfee and Trend Micro were the most paranoid and onerous to use, while those from AVG, Avira, BitDefender, Kaspersky Lab and Microsoft were unobtrusive, asking no questions and not blocking a single program,” the research paper shows.
According to Dennis Technology Labs, all anti-virus solutions included in the tests had to deal with real-life threats, so the results we're seeing here could be really close to reality, as far as the protection offered to users is concerned.
“The threats used in this test were genuine, real-life threats that were infecting victims globally at the time that we tested the products. The types of infected or malicious sites were varied, which demonstrates that effective anti-virus software is essential for those who want to use the web using a Windows PC. Most threats installed automatically when a user visited the infected webpage. This infection was often invisible to a casual observer,” the company said.
Again, Microsoft's Security Essentials served as the baselines of anti-virus tests and achieved an accuracy score of only 64 percent and leaving some forms of malware reach the computers.