Latest antivirus test results from Andreas Marx

As always, good stuff from Andreas Marx of Av-Test.org:

We have just finished a new comparison test of AV software. All products (in the "best" available Security Suite edition) were last updated on January 7, 2008 and tested on Windows XP SP2 (English).

First, we checked the signature-based on-demand detection of all products against more than 1 Mio. samples we've found spreading or which were distributed during the last six months (this means, we have not used any "historic" samples.) We included all malware categories in the test: Trojan Horses, backdoors, bots, worm and viruses. Instead of just presenting the results, we have ranked the product this time, from "very good" (++) if the scanner detected more than 98% of the samples to "poor" (--) when less than 85% of the malware was detected.

Secondly, we checked the number of false positives of the products have generated during a scan of 65,000 known clean files. Only products with no false positives received a "very good" (++) rating.

In case of the proactive detection category, we have not only focussed on signature- and heuristic-based proactive detection only (based on a retrospective test approach with a one week old scanner).