Popular antivirus means bad antivirus
3 August 2006
This blog post from ZDNet Australia surprised me:
Antivirus applications from Symantec, McAfee or Trend Micro — the three leading AV vendors in 2005 — are far less likely to detect new viruses and Trojans than the least popular brands.
This has nothing to do with the quality of the software or how long it takes the respective firms to update their clients with signatures and other malware countermeasures.
[…]
However, the actual reason why the top selling antivirus applications don’t work is because malware authors are specifically testing their Trojans and viruses to make sure they can bypass these applications before releasing them in the wild.
“The most popular brands of antivirus on the market… have an 80 percent miss rate… So if you are running these pieces of software, eight out of 10 pieces of malicious code are going to get in…”
I mentioned Avast! Antivirus in the previous post because it is free, lightweight, and effective. It is even more attractive if being one of the little guys is a security advantage.
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Comment by UNNAMED — 13 June 2008 @ 1:36 am
AVG is the best antivirus because every website about them has said it is the best, i am also a customer and it works real well