How Effective Is Your Anti-Virus Program?

As many readers may know, I am not a big believer in anti-virus programs as an essential program for computer protection, however I ultimately had to cave due to customer VPN requirements and installed Microsoft Security Essentials. But enough about me and onto an interesting article with some statistics about the effectiveness of AV programs.

From the article:

23% of computers have no active security protection.
14% of the computers had some sort of high level threat.
Spyware is the most common malware threat followed by Rogue Security Software.
Kaspersky protects the best against Rogue Security Software and Trend Micro is the worst.
Symantec protects against spyware the best, and Kaspersky the worst.
Trend protects the best against keyloggers and Avast fares the worst.
Kaspersky protects against viruses the best, and Symantec tails the pack.

You can read the details of these statistics as well as how the data was gathered in the article, but this just goes to show you cannot rely on AV systems alone to protect you from threats. I am sure many of our readers are savvy enough to know when something isn’t quite right, but sometimes we all have lapses so make sure your system is ready.

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DravenX
You put this article up without suggestions?

Jason Faulkner
Check the first link in the post above… I make plenty of suggestions.

Steve Stone
When you make blanket statements about an anti virus software package, is that for ALL versions of that software? They come in many different flavors. Does Symantec Corporate Edition do any worse/better than the mainstream consumer edition? Generic comments don’t do anyone a favor and are perhaps a disservice to these companies.

Jason Faulkner
The whole point of this post is covered in my last paragraph: you can’t depend on AV programs alone to protect you.
I see the attitude all the time: “I have XXX AV installed, so I can do anything I want and it will protect me” which is just flat out wrong as this article points out.

http://twitter.com/philmonger Phil M
This is an article that is true for when “x and y conditions are met … ”
For a full out list of comparisons check :
http://www.av-comparatives.org/
its about the only worthwhile read on AV effectiveness.
http://www.markzonder.com/ Amy
When you make blanket statements about an anti virus software package, is that for ALL versions of that software? They come in many different flavors. Does Symantec Corporate Edition do any worse/better than the mainstream consumer edition? Generic comments don’t do anyone a favor and are perhaps a disservice to these companies.