The following guy, who calls himself Kobra has tested all the known AV products, take a look:
By Kobra 2/27/04
---------
Phew, the last few days have left me drained a good bit. I've tested over a dozen Anti-Virus programs pretty extensively. This testing was spured by the fact that NortonAV 2004 missed the third Trojan/virus this month and let the latest one run free, and wouldn't even stop it. This led to research that indeed showed NortonAV is one of the worst AV programs out there (AVG has the title of the worst). But it also showed me that most of the big commercial AV softwares are rather poor and overrated...
My initial sweep of tests narrowed the field of contenders down to a four HARDCORE AV programs, amoung these were:
Kaspersky AV
BitDefender
Panda
NOD32
I found all 4 of these to offer superb protection, and I personally feel nobody could go horribly wrong with choosing any of the 4 - but some aren't as good as the others in my opinion - read on.. They all offer daily updates, and one (BitDefender) offers updates every 8 hours. The company that supports NOD32 releases updates daily but sometimes during outbreaks they come in HOURLY.
All 4 offer realtime protection for emailing, surfing the net, memory and basically anything that happens on your computer throughout the day. Kasperskys resident program clearly had memory leaks, and performance degradation of the system was noticable. The others offered no measurable difference in performance. NOD32 does not scan outgoing mails, only incoming and databases, all the rest scan both inbound and outbound.
For normal scanning, all 4 offer this of course, as a core of any AV program. The differences in speed between them was astounding. When all of them were set to scan at the same level of detail (full, archives, deep), they all scanned at different speeds. Results are here:
160GB Hard drive, filled with 60+GB of programs. (and lotsa them)
Kaspersky - 6 hours!
BitDefender - 55 minutes
Panda - 43 minutes
NOD32 - 7 minutes!!!
Clearly, Kaspersky has some serious issues with its scanning engine, namely, it sucks. BitDefender and Panda were both good, and fast, but NOD32 was simply out of this world in its speed! 7 minutes for a very deep scan, only 3-4 minutes for a normal scan. Kaspersky was also plagued with false positives and inaccuracies.(more on this later)
For my testing, I burned a CDR with 5 total viruses and trojans. 3 of them were fake, designed by Eicar, but mimic trojans and viruses, and 2 of the other ones were real, one was a trojan. All 4 of the programs wouldn't even let me copy these to my hard drive without going off with their background scanners. In addition, I tried downloading fake viruses from Eicar, and all of the programs caught every single one of them, but NOD32 and BitDefender took this a step farther and actually intercepted them BEFORE they were allowed to be copied to temp folders, the others dealt with them after being in temp folder.
Kaspersky exhibited a serious problem with false alarms. It flagged one of my files - DVDFab.v1.51.WinALL.Cracked-BLiZZARD.RAR as containing a Trojan named: Backdoor.Aphexdoor.10, which is a new trojan found only a few weeks ago. This scared me, since no other product detected a problem with this file, so I sent the file specifics into NOD, Panda and BitDefender, and got replies from all three within a few hours. The result? False reporting from Kaspersky. Best that anyone could determine was that at one time, this archive DID contain the trojan, but it had already been purged and cleaned by someone elses virus system, and a original build signature was left in the RAR info or something.
I have personally verified this as well, Trojan Hunter found nothing in the file, I even installed the file and watched the background files be logged and there is no trojan in it. So it appears that Kaspersky doesn't have any control on their scanning and basically reports EVERYTHING, without any real control or error correction, or any discrimination. Which would explain the 4-6 hour scan times maybe?
As for their interfaces, Panda has the simplest and most easy interface -however this comes at the price of configurability and options - which this product doesn't have. It does a GREAT job, but just isn't configurable and doesn't offer much flexibility. BitDefender is the overall winner in terms of interface, with the best and easiest interface with great configurabilility. NOD32 comes in a close second, being more for the advanced user, with massively configurable options, and 3 seperate integrated modules. Kaspersky comes in last place, with what is perhaps, the worst interface known to man. Clumsy, sloppy, slow, and doesn't even look like a windows product! HORRIBLE!
NOD32 is the most advanced overall, with the most features and configurations, BitDefender is second but only by a small margin. It should be noted that Microsoft itself uses NOD32 to scan all of their products that they have, and products they are prepping to send out to be burned for distribution.
Overall, heres how I rate the best, and I honestly feel that these 4 products are the best, if you are seeking a anti-virus solution, i'd recommend you pick one of the 4, they all work pretty well, but heres how I rate em if you want the best in my opinion.
1. NOD32 - The king in my tests, lacking in only one area, outbound email scanning(but is this really needed anyway?), but ungodly strong in every other area with more features than you can possibly imagine. HOURLY updates are supported as well and the program has such a small and unobtrusive interface its hard to not fall in love with it. The sheer speed of its scanning engine is another reason I liked this one the most.
http://www.nod32.com/home/home.htm
2. BitDefender - Close second to NOD32, very close.. This one was a tough call! Bitdefender has a friendlier interface, and supports outbound email scanning as well. But it placed second only because its scanning was considerably slower than NOD32, and it lacked a few configuration options that I really enjoy in NOD32. GREAT choice though. Tough call!
http://www.bitdefender.com/index.php
3. Panda - This guy is really nice, finds threats that all the big commercial ones like Norton/McAfee and others miss. But lacks configurability and options, and doesn't seem to have as advanced of a scanning engine. Also it has daily updates, rather than 8 hours like Bit, and hourly like NOD32. Either way, Panda is superb choice, especially for those not worried about configurability.
http://www.pandasoftware.com
4. Kaspersky - Its hard to recommend this product. Its slow, the interface sucks, it takes up too much ram and has memory leaks, and takes hours to scan your drives. It also LOVES reporting threats that have already been neutralized, or non-existant threats - which can drive you crazy! I've also found Kaspersky prone to crashing and lockups. Even still, its not a bad product, just horribly un-refined and clumsey.
http://www.kaspersky.com/
Hope this helps anyone looking for a top end AV product. I've found that its best to TOTALLY avoid the big marketed enduser products like Norton, Mcafee, Pc-cillin and the others. They performed HORRIBLY compared to the ones on this roundup. Also, I tested AVG, and found it to be perhaps the worst product ever, it missed even the most basic dummy viruses I sent its way.
Checking Virus Bulletin, I see NOD32 has nearly a 100% perfect record over the last few years, and is the only product to score nearly this high.
http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/products.xml?eset.xml
25 passes, 3 fails. One fail in 1998 under Dos, another in 2000 under NT, and in 2002 with SuSE Linux. Nothing has come close to this performance at VBTN. compare this with my top-4 list.
http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/pro...l?kaspersky.xml
Kaspersky 20 passes, 13 fails.
http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/pro...s.xml?panda.xml
Panda 1 pass, 3 fails. (but in fairness, its a new product for Vbnt)
http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/pro...bitdefender.xml
BitDefender 3 passes, 5 fails.
Obviously in their testing methodlogy, NOD32 is far far and away the ultimate winner. But I don't subscribe, so I cannot see what they use as a
testbed. My guess is they throw a few hundred virus at each product, and see how it reacts. On a side note, AVG's score:
http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/products.xml?avg.xml
AVG 3 passes 20 fails...
---------------
Well, there you go, never touch AVG and norton, just because there easy to get or free, I'm not saying you suck because you have the "not so good" AV software, but I came here to say this just to ensure the hl2.net people have good protection
By Kobra 2/27/04
---------
Phew, the last few days have left me drained a good bit. I've tested over a dozen Anti-Virus programs pretty extensively. This testing was spured by the fact that NortonAV 2004 missed the third Trojan/virus this month and let the latest one run free, and wouldn't even stop it. This led to research that indeed showed NortonAV is one of the worst AV programs out there (AVG has the title of the worst). But it also showed me that most of the big commercial AV softwares are rather poor and overrated...
My initial sweep of tests narrowed the field of contenders down to a four HARDCORE AV programs, amoung these were:
Kaspersky AV
BitDefender
Panda
NOD32
I found all 4 of these to offer superb protection, and I personally feel nobody could go horribly wrong with choosing any of the 4 - but some aren't as good as the others in my opinion - read on.. They all offer daily updates, and one (BitDefender) offers updates every 8 hours. The company that supports NOD32 releases updates daily but sometimes during outbreaks they come in HOURLY.
All 4 offer realtime protection for emailing, surfing the net, memory and basically anything that happens on your computer throughout the day. Kasperskys resident program clearly had memory leaks, and performance degradation of the system was noticable. The others offered no measurable difference in performance. NOD32 does not scan outgoing mails, only incoming and databases, all the rest scan both inbound and outbound.
For normal scanning, all 4 offer this of course, as a core of any AV program. The differences in speed between them was astounding. When all of them were set to scan at the same level of detail (full, archives, deep), they all scanned at different speeds. Results are here:
160GB Hard drive, filled with 60+GB of programs. (and lotsa them)
Kaspersky - 6 hours!
BitDefender - 55 minutes
Panda - 43 minutes
NOD32 - 7 minutes!!!
Clearly, Kaspersky has some serious issues with its scanning engine, namely, it sucks. BitDefender and Panda were both good, and fast, but NOD32 was simply out of this world in its speed! 7 minutes for a very deep scan, only 3-4 minutes for a normal scan. Kaspersky was also plagued with false positives and inaccuracies.(more on this later)
For my testing, I burned a CDR with 5 total viruses and trojans. 3 of them were fake, designed by Eicar, but mimic trojans and viruses, and 2 of the other ones were real, one was a trojan. All 4 of the programs wouldn't even let me copy these to my hard drive without going off with their background scanners. In addition, I tried downloading fake viruses from Eicar, and all of the programs caught every single one of them, but NOD32 and BitDefender took this a step farther and actually intercepted them BEFORE they were allowed to be copied to temp folders, the others dealt with them after being in temp folder.
Kaspersky exhibited a serious problem with false alarms. It flagged one of my files - DVDFab.v1.51.WinALL.Cracked-BLiZZARD.RAR as containing a Trojan named: Backdoor.Aphexdoor.10, which is a new trojan found only a few weeks ago. This scared me, since no other product detected a problem with this file, so I sent the file specifics into NOD, Panda and BitDefender, and got replies from all three within a few hours. The result? False reporting from Kaspersky. Best that anyone could determine was that at one time, this archive DID contain the trojan, but it had already been purged and cleaned by someone elses virus system, and a original build signature was left in the RAR info or something.
I have personally verified this as well, Trojan Hunter found nothing in the file, I even installed the file and watched the background files be logged and there is no trojan in it. So it appears that Kaspersky doesn't have any control on their scanning and basically reports EVERYTHING, without any real control or error correction, or any discrimination. Which would explain the 4-6 hour scan times maybe?
As for their interfaces, Panda has the simplest and most easy interface -however this comes at the price of configurability and options - which this product doesn't have. It does a GREAT job, but just isn't configurable and doesn't offer much flexibility. BitDefender is the overall winner in terms of interface, with the best and easiest interface with great configurabilility. NOD32 comes in a close second, being more for the advanced user, with massively configurable options, and 3 seperate integrated modules. Kaspersky comes in last place, with what is perhaps, the worst interface known to man. Clumsy, sloppy, slow, and doesn't even look like a windows product! HORRIBLE!
NOD32 is the most advanced overall, with the most features and configurations, BitDefender is second but only by a small margin. It should be noted that Microsoft itself uses NOD32 to scan all of their products that they have, and products they are prepping to send out to be burned for distribution.
Overall, heres how I rate the best, and I honestly feel that these 4 products are the best, if you are seeking a anti-virus solution, i'd recommend you pick one of the 4, they all work pretty well, but heres how I rate em if you want the best in my opinion.
1. NOD32 - The king in my tests, lacking in only one area, outbound email scanning(but is this really needed anyway?), but ungodly strong in every other area with more features than you can possibly imagine. HOURLY updates are supported as well and the program has such a small and unobtrusive interface its hard to not fall in love with it. The sheer speed of its scanning engine is another reason I liked this one the most.
http://www.nod32.com/home/home.htm
2. BitDefender - Close second to NOD32, very close.. This one was a tough call! Bitdefender has a friendlier interface, and supports outbound email scanning as well. But it placed second only because its scanning was considerably slower than NOD32, and it lacked a few configuration options that I really enjoy in NOD32. GREAT choice though. Tough call!
http://www.bitdefender.com/index.php
3. Panda - This guy is really nice, finds threats that all the big commercial ones like Norton/McAfee and others miss. But lacks configurability and options, and doesn't seem to have as advanced of a scanning engine. Also it has daily updates, rather than 8 hours like Bit, and hourly like NOD32. Either way, Panda is superb choice, especially for those not worried about configurability.
http://www.pandasoftware.com
4. Kaspersky - Its hard to recommend this product. Its slow, the interface sucks, it takes up too much ram and has memory leaks, and takes hours to scan your drives. It also LOVES reporting threats that have already been neutralized, or non-existant threats - which can drive you crazy! I've also found Kaspersky prone to crashing and lockups. Even still, its not a bad product, just horribly un-refined and clumsey.
http://www.kaspersky.com/
Hope this helps anyone looking for a top end AV product. I've found that its best to TOTALLY avoid the big marketed enduser products like Norton, Mcafee, Pc-cillin and the others. They performed HORRIBLY compared to the ones on this roundup. Also, I tested AVG, and found it to be perhaps the worst product ever, it missed even the most basic dummy viruses I sent its way.
Checking Virus Bulletin, I see NOD32 has nearly a 100% perfect record over the last few years, and is the only product to score nearly this high.
http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/products.xml?eset.xml
25 passes, 3 fails. One fail in 1998 under Dos, another in 2000 under NT, and in 2002 with SuSE Linux. Nothing has come close to this performance at VBTN. compare this with my top-4 list.
http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/pro...l?kaspersky.xml
Kaspersky 20 passes, 13 fails.
http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/pro...s.xml?panda.xml
Panda 1 pass, 3 fails. (but in fairness, its a new product for Vbnt)
http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/pro...bitdefender.xml
BitDefender 3 passes, 5 fails.
Obviously in their testing methodlogy, NOD32 is far far and away the ultimate winner. But I don't subscribe, so I cannot see what they use as a
testbed. My guess is they throw a few hundred virus at each product, and see how it reacts. On a side note, AVG's score:
http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/products.xml?avg.xml
AVG 3 passes 20 fails...
---------------
Well, there you go, never touch AVG and norton, just because there easy to get or free, I'm not saying you suck because you have the "not so good" AV software, but I came here to say this just to ensure the hl2.net people have good protection
