Antivirus Performance Declined in Comparison to 2006

The efficiency of antivirus software has reduced allowing increased worms to surpass these filters. The computer magazine of Germany, c't, has given this serious conclusion in its issue of 1/08 that includes a test over 17 antivirus solutions. The magazine also assessed the subject of behavioral blocking for the first time.

While assessed by c't regarding the overflow of fresh malware, nearly all products performed considerably bad in comparison to 2006. The usual recognition rates relating to their heuristics declined from around 40 to 50% in the concluding test during the starting of 2007 to a shocking 20-30%.

The researchers of Kaspersky Labs in a subsequent report released on December 20, 2007 stated that the worsening of heuristics might be further increasing due to the online scanners. For instance, sites like Virus Total permit the customers to scrutinize a misleading file, which then evaluates the code to verify for malicious code against 32 antivirus products.

In a report published by heise Security on December 20, 2007, the researchers said as this happens so often, something positive that assist the users to verify the reliability of their files might also be exploited by virus writers. They promptly take advantage of the fact that such services (ones mentioned just above) could be exploited to check the efficiency of their creations on breaking into the famous antivirus solutions.

One of the factors why nearly all the scanners performed worse under the heuristics tests during 2006 came to be professionalization concerning the malware prospect that requires pumping of excessive energy and time to slide this object past the shielding software. However, a more alarming fact is the significant downfall in the recognition rates of the virus substitutes designed experimentally by the c't. Almost all the scanners failed to detect the virus variants which they had detected during the year 2006.

However, the encouraging facts reported by the c't are 68% detection of entirely unfamiliar attacks by Eset's NOD32. F-Secure also performed credibly under the test of behavioral blocking that assessed how well the machine was protected by a product against infection. BitDefender and Kaspersky also got favorable response.

Related article: Antivirus Scanners Face Difficulty in Detecting Malicious Code

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