News
A third of anti-malware products fail to secure Vista Business Edition, Virus Bulletin reveals
August 2010 by Marc Jacob
Virus Bulletin, the independent security certification body,
revealed that, out of 54 anti-malware products tested, 19 failed
to reach the standard required for VB100 certification on
Windows Vista Business Edition SP2 - including McAfee, Norman,
BitDefender, eEye and G DATA.
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.
