I was recently asked to give a talk to the association of retired police officers (ARPO) about Internet security i.e. Anti Virus and all that sort of stuff – they must have been stuck for someone interesting to talk to them so in a fit of panic asked me to!
Anyway, in doing research for the talk I came across a very interesting fact – AVG is no longer the best free antivirus out there – and I thought you should know about it.
I regularly review statistics on anti-virus products in an attempt to keep up with current trends and to offer my customers the best advice that I can. Every time that I have checked over at least the past 8 years, either AVG or Avast have been the best free antivirus products with Kasperskey usually topping the list of products that you have to pay for. Well this month to my suprise there is a new guy that has knocked AVG and Avast from the top free positions – its name is Panda antivirus.
I always use two different test companies to ensure, as much as possible, that I am getting a reliable result. The ones I use are www.av-comparatives.org and www.av-test.org and they are independant testing companies with good reputations for publishing accurate information. In the most recent tests Panda Free Antivirus achieved better results than both AVG free edition and the free verion of Avast. When av-test.org tested Panda, it achieved a perfect 100 percent score when challenged with 138 “0 day” malware attacks (a zero day attack is a brand new virus that has never been seen before so they are therefore usually the hardest to detect). In the same test AVG achieved 96 percent and Avast 94 percent. Over at av-comparatives.org Panda achieved 99.9 percent, AVG got 97.2 percent and Avast 97 percent. These are all close numbers, but lets face it, if you are not going to pay for your Anti-Virus product then why not use the best?
On another related note, just to re re-itterate my previous comments about Microsoft Security Essentials, it achieved 86 percent with av-test.org and 88.7 percent with av-comparatives.org this is last place for both sites, making it essentially the worst antivirus you could use. There is just no good reason why any rational person would choose to use it to protect their computer.
If you would like to get your hands on a copy of Panda Anti-Virus then you can get a copy here…
http://www.cloudantivirus.com/en
That’s about it for this month – if you have any preference for a subject to be covered or have any general questions that you would like an answer to then please just drop me a line at the email address below and I’ll do my best to accommodate.