The Best Antivirus for 2013
Contents
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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