Anti virus testing

Attackers get past security measures by hiding malware deep within compressed files. There are a number of legitimate compression formats commonly used and easily opened by typical end users on most operating systems other than ZIP, such as:.

EICAR test virus is not a real virus. Test viruses are built for testing and observing the features and reactions of your anti-malware solution when a virus is found. Download the test file to your computer. The EICAR test virus is the only standardized way to watch anti-virus-programs doing their job, and therefore probably all of them will detect and name the file. Nevertheless, this says nothing about detection rates and protective performance of the tested software.

If the EICAR test file is not detected by your malware scanner, we recommend looking for the reason because it might be caused by malfunctions. But yours is not. And if you want to tweak a few things here and there, it should not be too hard to find how to do this.

It is also nice if your questions are answered quickly. Therefore, the level of customer service the provider offers is also important. This is also taken into account in our performance ratings. Last but not least, pay attention to the speed of the scans. You do not want to wait hours for your scan to run. On the contrary, you should not notice that your virus scanner is even running.

So, it is important to know if an antivirus program will slow down your computer. To test this, we ran several programs while the virus scanner was running, and looked at the percentage of working memory, hard drive, and processor capacity the antivirus programs used while working. August April February All products can achieve a maximum of 6 points each in the three categories of protection, performance and usability. This means 18 points are the best possible test result.

At December 20, VPN Tests. December 01, Antivirus for Windows. November 29, Antivirus for Windows. The tests do not provide comparative results for different products, and so may be of very limited use when deciding which security program to buy. Certification reports do not usually state how many times a product had to be tested before reaching the required standard. Some certifications may only prove that a vendor has the financial resources to pay for the process, and that its product is able to reach a minimum standard at one point in time.

A paper with useful information about certification testing can be found here. The foundation supports several U. It provides evaluations of enterprise solutions against such attacks. These may be very valuable to participating security vendors and some IT-security specialists. However, their reports do not present the data so as to allow easy comparison of the effectiveness of different products.

A further interesting article about some tests and how to interpret them can be found here. Independent Testing Organizations There are several security-product testing organizations around the world. MRG Effitas.