Symantec and Kaspersky clean-up in AV-Test

Posted by kent on December 18th, 2009

Independent antivirus testing firm AV-Test has released its latest scores for Internet security software and Kaspersky and Symantec have come out on top. The three-month test found Symantec's Norton Internet Security 2010 caught 98% of what the company calls zero-day threats, and Kaspersky catching 97.5%, the highest scores in the group they tested.

"Zero-day threats" represent brand new malware occurrences which AV-Test feels is a more realistic way to test security software than with a collection of older, canned samples. The latter method, according to CEO Andreas Marx, is how most labs test their software. It's important to note that these are detection rates; blocking/warning rates were also analyzed. Here Norton came in second to PC Tools Internet Security 2010, but was only behind by 2%. More details on the blocking ratings, including false positive rates, are in this article

We're glad to see Symantec and Kaspersky continuing to do well in independent testing.  You can find out about our experiences with Symantec and Kaspersky, as well as many others in the above group, in the Internet security software reviews section of NextAdvisor.com.