Rating the best anti-malware solutions

Following its November 2009 retrospective/proactive report, AV-Comparatives has released its December 2009 Potentially Unwanted Applications (PUA) comparative. PUA refers to adware, spyware, rogue, and other fraudulent software circulating on the Internet that are not typical malware (classification in the last category is sometimes not an easy task; under some circumstances, PUAs are accepted in some countries, depending on the cultural background or the legal system, and hence the term "potentially unwanted"). AV-Comparatives typically do not include PUAs in their malware test sets, but since users may want to know how well their antivirus program detects potentially unwanted software, a separate test was created.

The first PUA test contained 750,297 individual samples (only program executables) that cover mainly adware, spyware, and rogue software gathered between January 2009 and October 2009 (sets were frozen on the October 29, 2009). Dialers, potentially dangerous tools, and other greyware were not included, as their classification is debatable. Not all security products include detection for them as this sometimes breaks company policy. Sixteen products were updated on November 6, 2009, set on the highest detection settings (except for Sophos and F-Secure, per their own request), and put to the test.

Here are the results of this particular test:

1. G DATA Antivirus 2010: 99.8 percent
2. Trustport Antivirus 2010: 99.8 percent
3. AVIRA AntiVir Premium 9.0: 98.9 percent
4. McAfee VirusScan Plus 2010: 98.9 percent
5. BitDefender Antivirus 2010: 98.6 percent
6. eScan AntiVirus 10.0: 98.6 percent
7. F-Secure Anti-Virus 2010: 98.6 percent
8. Symantec Norton Antivirus 2010: 98.6 percent
9. Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010: 96.7 percent
10. ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4.0: 96.5 percent
11. avast! Free 5.0: 96.3 percent
12. Sophos Antivirus 9.0.1: 95.4 percent
13. Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0: 94.6 percent
14. AVG Anti-Virus 9.0: 93.9 percent
15. Norman Antivirus & Anti-Spyware 7.30: 88.5 percent
16. Kingsoft AntiVirus 9 Plus: 87.1 percent