Everyone is always looking for a good anti-virus program these days
with all the malicious software floating around in our email, websites,
etc. You’ve probably read hundreds of “Best Anti-Virus” posts in your
life, but in this post I’ll try to give you a little more meat to why
you should pick one anti-virus program over another.
When it comes to anti-virus software, you want to know several
aspects of the program such as detection rates, scanning speed, number
of false positives, etc. All of these in combination make a difference.
For example, if one program has a very high detection rate (which is
good), it could be offset by the fact that it also finds a lot of false
positives. A false positive would basically mean finding a virus or
malicious program that really is not malware at all.
False positives can sometimes lead to more problems than actually
having a real infection on your computer. Files can be deleted or
removed, which could cause the operating system to become unstable or
unusable. Also, I would prefer to have a program than takes longer to
scan, but has a higher detection rate and a lower false positive rate.
This article will be broken down into these three sections and then
we’ll conclude with trying to determine which programs are the best
based on the data set.
Highest Detection Rate
The anti-virus software with the best results in terms of detecting the latest virus and malware are as follows:1. G Data
2. Trustport
3. AVIRA, Qihoo
4. Panda
5. F-Secure, eScan
6. Bitdefender
7. Kaspersky
8. ESET, Avast
9. McAfee
10. AVG
You can read the full detection rate report
written by AV-Comparatives.org, a very cool site that performs all
kinds of tests on anti-virus software. Basically, the top four have over
a 99% detection rate, which is very good.
Scanning Speed
In terms of scanning speed, which includes opening archive files,
reading large files, etc. Note that the tests performed by
AV-Comparatives is assuming you would want to do a full scan with all
options including advanced heuristics, scanning of all file types, etc.
Here are the top 10 anti-virus programs in terms of scanning speed:
2. Trend Micro
3. K7
4. McAfee
5. AVIRA
6. AVG
7. Sophos
8. Bitdefender
9. F-Secure
10. Webroot
As we can already see, it’s probably better to choose the programs
that show up in both lists, such as AVIRA, F-Secure, McAfee, AVG, etc.
However, we should take a look the false positives before deciding.
Number of False Positives
One of the most important aspects to any anti-virus program is it’s
ability to distinguish between clean files and infected ones. You have
to use this data in conjunction with the detection rates because any
program that has a large number of false alarms tends to get a higher
score.
There were only eight anti-virus program that had a “low” score in terms of false alarms (listed in order from low to high):
2. Kaspersky, Microsoft, Panda
3. ESET
4. F-Secure, Trend Micro
5. Bitdefender
6. Avast
7. AVIRA
8. G DATA
As you can see, there are only a few that are on all three lists,
namely McAfee, F-Secure, BitDefender, Avast, and AVIRA. You can be
pretty sure that installing any of those will be providing you with the
best overall anti-virus program out there. Of course, if you favor
detection rate over speed, you can adjust accordingly. Or if you wan the
least false positives, then you can pick that program.
Either way, the best virus protection software is not as simple as
which programs find the most problems on your computer. Like you’ve
probably heard before, it’s better to be accurate and precise rather
than just precise or just accurate.
What program are you using for protecting your computer from viruses
and malware? Do you prefer one program over another? Tell us in the
comments!
