Virus Bulletin this month released the results of a major comparative of the latest security products, covering a range of metrics. These include detection rates over various types of malware, false positive rates, scanning speed, proactive detection, and response times to outbreaks.
Taking a look at the first one, detection rates, it"s clear that a beta version of GDATA"s AVK 2009 (which uses the Avast and BitDefender scan engines) took first place for both malware (measured against 1,164,662 samples) as well as ad- and spyware (94,291 samples). Avira"s Premium Security Suite 2008 was second for malware, F-Secure 2009 was second in ad- and spyware, and Secure Computing"s Webwasher gateway product came third in both categories.
The most interesting data to emerge from this measurement (4 week span) was that the 2009 version of Norton topped the table with an impressive 6,202 incremental micro-updates, issued several times per hour, while Kaspersky came a distant second with a mere 696. Half of the 34 products tested had fewer than 100, including those from McAfee (21) and Trend Micro (30)