The OPSWAT study finds that there are a lot of disabled or expired Malwarebytes installations out there

Dec 14, 2015 13:51 GMT  ·  By
Windows anti-malware market share, real-time protection (RTP) enabled
6 photos
   Windows anti-malware market share, real-time protection (RTP) enabled

Once every quarter, OPSWAT releases a market study detailing the popularity of various anti-malware solutions currently available on the antivirus market. As in previous years, Microsoft's Security Essentials ranked above its competition.

According to the most recent report, released at the end of November, security products from Microsoft have a market share of 15.9%, followed by Avast with 15%, Malwarebytes with 11.6%, ESET with 7.1%, and Symantec with 6.1%.

The rest of the top 10 is rounded up by AVG with 5%, Avira with 4.3%, Kaspersky with 4.2%, Panda Security with 3.6%, and Safer-Networking also with 3.6%. Just outside of the top 10, we find Bitdefender with 3.2% and McAfee with 2.5%.

Windows Defender was removed from this data mainly because it comes pre-packaged with all Windows versions.

All the data above includes currently running anti-malware products. OPSWAT also took into account security products that expired or were disabled. Adding the two data sets together, the expanded top 10 is as follows: Malwarebytes (14.3%), Microsoft (10.6%), Avast (9.7%), IObit (6%), Symantec (5.6%), AVG (4.7%), ESET (4.6%), Kaspersky (4.1%), SUPERAntiSpyware (3.4%), and Avira (3.3%).

Mac users less conscious of their devices' security

OPSWAT also observed that 71.5% of the total number of scanned Windows devices came with an anti-malware software while, for Macs, this percentage was far lower, at only 57.2%.

Additionally, OPSWAT noted that 2.7% of all scanned Windows machines also had a persistent threat, virus infections that anti-malware solutions cannot uninstall automatically and require manual action from the user.

These infections are usually bootkits that reinstall themselves after each boot, or malware that comes via the same infection path, after the previous virus was removed.

OPSWAT also analyzed the Windows hard drive encryption market and found out that TrueCrypt leads the pack with 21.1%, followed by AVG Internet Security with 13.9%, Bitdefender Total Security with 12.8%, Sophos Safeguard with 10.4%, and Kaspersky Total Security with 7.3%. Windows Bitlocker was ignored for this study since it comes pre-packaged with most Windows versions.

The full OPSWAT report gathered data from 12,200 devices and is available for download.

Windows hard drive encryption market share
Windows hard drive encryption market share

Anti-malware market share (6 Images)

Windows anti-malware market share, real-time protection (RTP) enabled
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