Avira
My Kaspersky Antivirus beta user license ran out a few days back and I thought of trying back Avira after almost seven months.
A performance check revealed some results from av-comparatives on Avira Premium 2009. All tests were conducted at the highest settings of heuristics, and all antivirus users are advised to use these settings.
The test data is based on results from the last nine months of virus activity.
- G-Data had the highest detection rate of 99.8% [ 100% on macro viruses ] followed by Avira with 99.7%. Next in line was McAfee Virus Scan+ with 99.1% which it got due to a high detection rate of macro viruses(100%). Kaspersky achieved a detection rate of 97.1% with only a few false positives, whereas Avira and G-Data has many false positives in their detection. McAfee also had few false positives. All faired average in “On Demand Scanning speed”. These tests were made on a total of 1,274,928 samples.
- Avira as usual reports a high amount of false positives numbering to 24. G-Data had 44 false detections whereas Kaspersky and McAfee had 14 and 13 false detections respectively. The false alarm tests did not include keygens, cracks, patches and the likes.
- According to the final results, Avira was awarded a rating of advanced along with G-Data, whereas Kaspersky and McAfee were awarded Advanced+.
A new test was again conducted in March, where the selected 16 antiviruses from February’s tests were tested against new viruses with the definitions from February.
- Once again, Avira’s Proactive Defence had a high detection rate of 69%, with 50% from Kaspersky, 60% from G-Data and 25% from McAfee. Even in this list, G-Data and Avira had over 15 false positives, whereas kaspersky and McAfee had less than 15.
- According to this test, again, Kaspersky was awarded an Advanced+ level, whereas Avira and G-Data were given Advanced due to false alarms.
So, the final verdict is, around 15 false positives out of 20,000+ samples and 24 false positives out of 1,274,000+ samples is acceptable from the fact that Avira still had a high detection rate against trojans comparable only to G-Data. So, here I am back to using Avira.
Get Avira Antivir here : Avira Download
Get Avira Updates here : Avira Update
