The Cibertek Blog

What Anti-Virus program should I use?

I get that question at least once a week. My answer is usually whatever AV program I happen to be running at the time. Over the years the answer has changed. Because I’ve had to rebuild, restore, or clean several of my system over the years because of viruses; I am a firm believer in having some sort of AV or Malware scanner running in the background. So I’ve tried almost every AV software out there from Norton (Symantec), McAffee, and One Care to Kasperskyand ESET NOD32. In the past, the AV I decided to use depended on how much others were talking about it. Since there was no way to trust or verify what the individual companies claimed their products could do, the only ways was to either try the product yourself or read about what others were going thru.

The past few years however, I’ve made it a point to check out what I think is the only third-party source for independent AV software testing: AV-Comparatives. Every few months or so since 2004, these guys test AV software against each other. They test for instance, how well each AV detects known viruses, how fast they scan your system, and how many “false positives” they get. Each AV then gets a “Certification Level” based on their overall test result. The higher certification the better the AV product will be at scanning, catching, and preventing viruses from infecting your system.

There’s a lot more to the test of course so if you want to get to gritty details, read the reports. Read the archived reports to see how well your favorite AV has done over time. The real interesting thing for me is how some titles have stayed consistent over time and others go up and down the list from year to year. For instance, Microsoft’s One-Care, is now up there with NOD32. Just last year, it didn’t even make the list.

So what AV program should you use? According to AV-Comparatives May 2009 Proactive/retrospective test, these are the top 10:

1. AVIRA
2. Microsoft, G DATA (Tied for 2nd place)
3. ESET NOD32
4. BitDevender, Kaspersky, eScan (Tied for 4th place)
5. AVG
6. TrustPort, Avast (Tied for 6th place)
7. Sophos
8. Symantec
9. McAfee
10. Norman

For the more extensive test, “On demand detection for February 2009“, AV-Comparative uses their 3 part Award Level to rank the AV software:

* Advanced + Award Level
—— ESET NOD32, Kaspersky, Symantec, and McAfee
* Advanced Award Level
——  G DATA, AVIRA, Avast, BitDefender, eScan, TrustPort, F-Secure
* Standard Award Level
——- AVG, Sophos, Microsoft

So based on these findings, in my opinion, the top two for both proactive testing and on-demand detection are NOD32 and Kaspersky. I’ve used both over the past 3 years. They’re fast and have a small footprint on your system. Kaspersky is a little more annoying with notifications but you can turn that down or off if it bothers you enough. ESET NOD32 is clean and only bothers you when there is a real problem.

There is one product that didnt make the list at all for some reason PANDA AV Pro. Not sure why, so I would stay away from it. Panda does have a new promising product though, Panda Cloud Antivirus. I’m doing my own testing on a WinXP box and I will post any findings soon.