10 Years of Antivirus Protection

Many years ago, each new computer virus was big news, and each one got a name. Melissa, Michelangelo, ILoveYou, the list goes on. 1993 saw the arrival of the November 17 virus, named for the fact that on November 17 it would damage the hard drive of affected computers. One victim, a young Andreas Clementi, decided to fight back, embarking on a study of antivirus products as a student project. Later, he teamed up with Peter Stelzhammer to create what's now one of the best-known antivirus testing labs, AV-Comparatives. The just-released Anniversary Report looks back over the lab's 12 years of testing.

Stalwart Participants
Over the years, the researchers at AV-Comparatives have evaluated three dozen distinct product lines. Some, like PC Tools and GeCAD, don't even exist at present. But a stalwart cadre of six products have participated in testing every year for the last ten years or more.

That doesn't mean they always earned top ratings. As the report states, "We would like to congratulate them on their ongoing commitment to product improvement. This sometimes involves accepting a less than perfect result, but leads to better products and better protection for the consumer." And in fact, most of these stalwarts do receive good ratings, after all those years of improvement.

Avast, Avira, Bitdefender, ESET, Kaspersky, and McAfee actually participated in testing every year for the last twelve years.  AVG managed the last eleven years, and F-Secure contended during the last ten. These six products received the AV-Comparatives 10-year Participant Award.

Each of the honorees was invited to include a comment in the report, and (not surprisingly) all were positive. Avast said, "The overview AV-Comparatives provides is vital for us and the industry as a whole." AVG's Tony Anscombe said, "We are delighted to be a part of AV-Comparatives 10-year testing milestone and look forward to continuing this partnership." And McAfee/Intel noted, "There are many testers in the world but the number of high-quality testers can be counted on the fingers of one hand. AV-Comparatives in Austria is one such tester."

Tests Over the Years
During every year since 2004, the researchers at AV-Comparatives have performed single-product tests and reviews, on commission. As for public tests, the only one that spans the entire timeframe is the file detection test, which presents each tested product with over 100,000 malware samples and notes how many are detected. In 2008, they supplemented this test by checking for false positives (valid files erroneously reported as malicious).

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File detection tests measure how well a product recognizes known threats; what about brand-new zero-day attacks? From the start, these testers have also attempted to measure how well products handle unknown threats, using techniques like forcing products to use old antivirus signatures. At first, they called this testing Heuristic/Retrospective, but later it evolved into the Proactive/Behavioural test. In one form or the other, it's been around all twelve years.

Later additions include performance testing, real-world dynamic testing, and mobile security tests. Our reviews at PCMag have benefited immensely from the wealth of data in the reports from AV-Comparatives and the other major testing labs. Here's to another ten years of research and reporting!