It's easy
to feel overwhelmed by all the Heartbleed and NSA-spying stories in the news.
But there's still a lot you can do to keep your computer safe. The first
thing? Install antivirus software.
With all the NSA, Edward Snowden, and Heartbleed stories in the news, security
is arguably the tech story of the year. But while these big glitzy stories are
grabbing most of the attention, the most important thing you, the consumer, can
do, is to perform the decidedly unglamorous but vital task of securing your own
machines. And that means antivirus. All the big players have got 2014
edition products out, and some are even starting to ship 2015 editions! Many of
the latest versions have morphed their appearance to match the Windows 8 style,
tile-based and touch-friendly. Others remain unchanged, perhaps hoping to
attract users by keeping the same familiar face.
Whether they look the same or not, most of the
same products retain their positions at the top of the heap. Here are the best
from the current crop of antivirus products.
With all the NSA, Edward Snowden, and Heartbleed stories
in the news, security is
arguably the tech story of the year. But while these big glitzy stories are
grabbing most of the attention, the most important thing you, the consumer, can
do, is to perform the decidedly unglamorous but vital task of securing your own
machines. And that means antivirus. All the big players have got 2014
edition products out, and some are even starting to ship 2015 editions! Many of
the latest versions have morphed their appearance to match the Windows 8 style,
tile-based and touch-friendly. Others remain unchanged, perhaps hoping to
attract users by keeping the same familiar face.
Whether they look the same or not, most of the
same products retain their positions at the top of the heap. Here are the best
from the current crop of antivirus products. See here…
Independent
Lab Tests
I spend hours or days with every product
performing hands-on testing, but the independent antivirus labs have whole
squads of researchers for even more in-depth testing. I follow a half-dozen
labs that perform ongoing tests and that make their results public: AV-Test, AV-Comparatives, Dennis
Technology
Labs, ICSA Labs, Virus Bulletin, and West Coast Labs.
I take independent testing quite seriously, and
I recently worked up a new systemto evaluate each product in light of its
lab results. I've identified five important categories: detection, cleaning,
protection, false positives, and performance. When there's enough data from the
labs, I use it to calculate a star rating in each category, and an overall
rating.
As you can see in the chart below, Kaspersky and
Bitdefender get really excellent scores across the board. That's certainly a
good sign. Note that while Microsoft Security Essentials appears in
the chart, most of the labs treat it as a baseline, not as a serious contender.
Microsoft agrees; they're not trying to compete with the third-party vendors.
They just want to make sure everyone has some degree of protection.
Even the independent labs don't have unlimited
resources, so there's a dearth of results for some products. I'll be talking
with some of the more flexible labs about the possibility of expanding the
collection of products they test.
The cloud-based behavioral monitoring of Webroot
SecureAnywhere Antivirus (2014)$19.99 at Webroot is wildly different from
almost any other product, and it's just not compatible with many test setups.
As a result, it hardly gets tested at all. That's a shame, because it's
amazingly tiny and scans amazingly fast.
For a detailed description of the lab tests that
I follow and of the way I summarize them into a chart like the one below,
please see How We Interpret Antivirus Lab Tests. Continue reading…
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