Stumbling blocks for the products in this test included failure to detect a number of viruses known to be circulating in the wild and false alarms produced on clean files from major software houses including Corel, Roxio and Adobe. But alongside these issues, the test team also encountered problems with product design and stability.

"Once again we have looked at a huge range of products, and found a wide variation in performance and effectiveness. Most notable this month, though, has been the remarkable level of instability under pressure noted in many of the products - while our tests do put unusual strain on products, it is clearly important that security software should continue to function under pressure, and should not crumble in the face of heavy attack," said John Hawes, Virus Bulletin’s Anti-Malware Test Director. "Flaky behaviour will certainly not instill a sense of security in users, and developers need to ensure their quality control is thorough and comprehensive, to keep their users properly protected at all times."

The review provides a wealth of data that gives insight into how the various solutions stack up against each other in a wide range of ways, including some detailed performance analysis as well as detection rates and the testing team’s thoughts on the user experience.

Virus Bulletin has been testing and certifying anti-malware products for more than ten years in the VB100 certification scheme. The stringent VB100 tests pit anti-malware products against a test set of malware from the WildList - a publicly available up-to-date list of the malware that is known to be circulating on computers around the world. To earn VB100 certification, products must be able to detect 100% of the malware contained in the WildList test set and must not generate any false alarms when scanning a set of clean files.