Ah, autumn! There's a chill in the air, the leaves are turning colors, and the big antivirus vendors are releasing their 2015 models. The sheer quantity is amazing. If you don't have antivirus protection installed, shame on you—there's something for everyone in the extremely large antivirus field. If you've already seen to setting up protection, see how your choice stacks up to the competition. Since this roundup's last update in September, we've added reviews of eight new and updated for-pay antivirus tools. Most of the same products retain their positions at the top of the heap. Here are the best from the current crop of commercial antivirus products.
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 six major labs that perform ongoing tests and 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've worked up a rating 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, Panda, 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.
The cloud-based behavioral monitoring of Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus (2015)$19.99 at Webroot is wildly different from almost any other product, and it's just not compatible with many test setups. However, in test reports from Dennis Technology Labs and MRG-Effitas earlier this year Webroot earned the best possible rating.
Hands-On Testing
For every antivirus review, I run a hands-on test of the product's ability to detect and prevent malware attacks. 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.
I've been running the URL blocking test for a year, and found a very wide range of scores. At present, McAfee AntiVirus Plus 2015$39.99 at Dell holds the top score, with 85 percent blocked. ESET NOD32 Antivirus 8$39.99 at ESET North Americaand F-Secure Anti-Virus 2015 came close, with 81 and 80 percent respectively. Kaspersky and Bitdefender clearly concentrate their efforts in other protection layers; neither did well in this particular test.
Read more: The best Antivirus for 2015
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 six major labs that perform ongoing tests and 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've worked up a rating 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, Panda, 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.
The cloud-based behavioral monitoring of Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus (2015)$19.99 at Webroot is wildly different from almost any other product, and it's just not compatible with many test setups. However, in test reports from Dennis Technology Labs and MRG-Effitas earlier this year Webroot earned the best possible rating.
Hands-On Testing
For every antivirus review, I run a hands-on test of the product's ability to detect and prevent malware attacks. 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.
I've been running the URL blocking test for a year, and found a very wide range of scores. At present, McAfee AntiVirus Plus 2015$39.99 at Dell holds the top score, with 85 percent blocked. ESET NOD32 Antivirus 8$39.99 at ESET North Americaand F-Secure Anti-Virus 2015 came close, with 81 and 80 percent respectively. Kaspersky and Bitdefender clearly concentrate their efforts in other protection layers; neither did well in this particular test.
Read more: The best Antivirus for 2015