[funsec] Consumer Reports magazine rates anti-virus software

[Dude VanWinkle]

On 8/12/06, Richard M. Smith <rms at bsf-llc.com> wrote:
> The September 2006 issue of Consumer Reports magazine
> (http://www.consumerreports.org) rates a dozen desktop anti-virus software
> packages.  Here are the results:
>
> 1. BitDefender Standard 87
> 2. ZoneAlarm AV 85
> 3. Kaspersky Personal AV 82
> 4. Norton AV 80
> 5. Norton AV for Mac 80
> 6. McAfee ViruScan 77
> 7. Trend Micro PC-cillin 75
> 8. Alwil Avast! 68
> 9. F-secure AV 66
> 10. Panda Titanium AV 64
> 11. CA/eTrust EZ AV 57
> 12. PC Tools AV 41


Finding the standouts. Our next round of tests helped us identify
superior antivirus software by measuring how well each of the products
identified new viruses even before their signatures had been
downloaded. The antivirus programs did this by using a technique known
as heuristics, in which they seek out behaviors rather than
signatures.

To pit the software against novel threats not identified on signature
lists, we created 5,500 new virus variants derived from six categories
of known viruses, the kind you'd most likely encounter in real life.

That done, we unleashed the new viruses in our labs to see how well
the products detected them while scanning. Then we infected our lab
computer with each of 185 of them to see whether the products could
better detect viruses that were actively executing, based on their
behavior.

Finally, to see how often the antivirus software raised false alarms
by identifying benign files as viral, we scanned more than 100,000
clean files.