The Best Antivirus for 2013
Contents
- The Best Antivirus for 2013
- Ad-Aware to BullGuard
- Comodo to Malwarebytes
- McAfee to Sophos
- Spybot to Webroot
The year 2014 is less than a month away, but for
most of the antivirus industry it's already here. Many products have
"2014" in the name. Others have stopped using version and year
numbers, but they're still "(2014)" editions. These two groups
account for more than half of the antivirus products we track. Only a handful
of 2013 editions remain.
As new versions arrive, most of the same products
retain their positions at the top of the heap. Here are the best from the
current crop of antivirus products.
HOW THEY TEST THE ANTIVIRUS |
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Independent Lab Tests
I spend hours or days with every product performing hands-on testing, but the independent antivirus labs have whole squads of researchers for even more in-depth testing. I follow a half-dozen labs that perform ongoing tests and that make their results public: , AV-Test, AV-Comparatives, Dennis Technology Labs, ICSA Labs, Virus Bulletin, and West Coast Labs.
I take independent testing quite seriously, and I
recently worked up a new system to evaluate each product in light of
its lab results. I've identified five important categories: detection,
cleaning, protection, false positives, and performance. When there's enough
data from the labs, I use it to calculate a star rating in each category, and
an overall rating.
As you can see in the chart below,
Kaspersky and Bitdefender get really excellent scores across the board. That's
certainly a good sign.
Even the independent labs don't have unlimited
resources, so there's a dearth of results for some products. I'll be talking
with some of the more flexible labs about the possibility of expanding the
collection of products they test.
Symantec contends that many tests
don't reflect real-world protection, so the occasional low score for Norton AntiVirus (2014) isn't a big deal.
Symantec also opts out entirely from certain tests. I find, though, that there
are plenty of dynamic, real-world tests that quite accurately simulate a user's
experience. I also observe that other vendors manage to ace these tests.
Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus (2014) is
another story. Its cloud-based behavioral monitoring is wildly different from
almost any other product, and it's just not compatible with many test setups.
As a result, it hardly gets tested at all. That's a shame, because it's
amazingly tiny and scans amazingly fast.
For a
detailed description of the lab tests that I follow and of the way I summarize them
into a chart like the one below, please see How We Interpret Antivirus Lab Tests.
Hands-On
Testing
For every antivirus review, I run a hands-on test of the product's ability to detect and prevent malware attack. I also check each product's ability to detect and prevent download of the very latest malware. Starting with a feed of links from London-based MRG-Effitas, I sift out those that point directly to a malicious executable online. Using executable file links makes it easy for me to measure success. If a malicious download reaches the desktop, the antivirus failed. If it wipes out the file during download, or blocks access to the URL completely, it succeeded.
The links I use are never more than a day old,
sometimes just hours old. That means each product hits a different set of
links, but in every case they're extremely recent. I do plug away until I've
tested about 100 links, figuring the daily differences will average out. This
is definitely more real-world than my standard malware blocking test, which
necessarily uses the same samples for as much as a year. As I run more products
through the malicious URL blocking tests, I'll give it more emphasis in my
ratings.
The chart
below shows results from both tests. For more detail on my test methods, see How We Test Malware Blocking.
In the past I've run tests evaluating how well
products clean up systems infested with live, active malware. An incident with GameOver Zeus using my test systems for its own
purposes convinced me that this kind of testing isn't as safe as it once was. I
can't in good conscience keep running a test that might cause harm outside my
testbed, so I'll be relying more on the independent labs. I will, of course,
continue to explore and report on the tools and services that each vendor
offers to handle malware that prevents antivirus installation, or subverts the
scanning process.
The Best
Products
The antivirus field is huge; I currently track over 45 products. In a field that big there's room for multiple products to earn the title of Editors' Choice.
The antivirus field is huge; I currently track over 45 products. In a field that big there's room for multiple products to earn the title of Editors' Choice.
Three products share the Editor's Choice honor for
best overall antivirus: Bitdefender Antivirus Plus (2014) at BitDefender,
Norton AntiVirus (2014) at Norton, and Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus (2014) at Webroot.
With its impressive sweep of the independent labs, Kaspersky Anti-Virus (2014) is another very good
choice. Had I crafted my new lab-analysis system earlier, Kaspersky would have
been Editors' Choice, and Norton wouldn't.
AVG AntiVirus FREE 2014 is our current Editors' Choice for free antivirus. It shares the top score in my hands-on malware blocking test with four others, among them Avira Free AntiVirus (2014) and FortiClient 5.0 (also free).
AVG AntiVirus FREE 2014 is our current Editors' Choice for free antivirus. It shares the top score in my hands-on malware blocking test with four others, among them Avira Free AntiVirus (2014) and FortiClient 5.0 (also free).
COMPARE CHART
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