After writing the previous entry on vendor-sponsored tests and seeing comments about it, I thought it might be good to explain what AV products do, how they typically gets tested, and how they should be tested. And, I will discuss a bit in a more thorough fashion what is wrong with the testing that was performed by Dennis Technology Lab. I had attempted in the previous posting to illustrate the uselessness of the DTL testing with humor—it did not work with some people (especially at least one Symantec person). So, here is a more straightforward approach.
I thought it would be good to start with a basic tutorial on what antivirus software does……. Read more…
Recently two tests by what is described as the “respected independent testing company Dennis Technology Labs” have been released by Symantec. The first of these was a comparison of Norton 2009 AntiVirus and the beta of Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE)—it concluded that Norton was far superior. The second was a comparison of 10 AV products (including Avast Home Edition) to determine which was best at detecting 40 real-life infected websites—Norton Internet Security was the best. Needless to say, these reports and results are highly suspect.
Why do AV companies commission such tests? Usually because they cannot get the results they want from independently published tests. Why do “testing labs” perform such tests? Because they are paid to. Why don’t AV companies just do their own tests and publish the results? Because they know that reviewers and readers won’t believe the results. Read more…
Last week we traveled to Moscow to meet with our major Russian partner—Avsoft (www.avast.ru ). At our recent Reseller Conference here in Prague we had named Avsoft our “Global Rising Star Partner”—they had the highest growth of all our resellers in the world. Unfortunately, because of visa issues Avsoft’s leader, Alexey Tarasov, was unable to attend our conference so we went to Moscow to personally present him the award. Avsoft has done a terrific job of building our business in Moscow—he has built a network of hundreds of resellers and is more than doubling the business this year. Read more…
Hello again, this time I would like to present a story of one successful malware family. Why successful? Because it established a new way of spreading some time ago and mainly because it always scored very well in our statistics of malware detected in the wild. And what’s Kavo? It’s a name derived from the filenames of some binaries used by the malware family (kavo0.dll, kavo1.dll etc.). The malware family is known under different names such as Oliga, Kavos, Kamso, OnLineGames, Taterf etc.
Read more…
As many of you many know, Microsoft released their free security product earlier this week. Called MSE (Microsoft Security Essentials), it is a replacement for their One Care Product. It has been interesting reading the press coverage and the reaction from competitors. Some declare it will transform the security business and solve all security problems. Some equate it to a bad movie sequel. And some think it is Shakespearean—”Much Ado about Nothing”. Read more…
Categories: CEO's corner Tags: antivirus, avast, avg, avira, free antivirus, kaspersky, McAfee, Microsoft, MSE, security essentials, symantec
VB2009 took place at the Crowne Plaza Geneva, Switzerland (September 23 – 25). VB conferences always offer a opportunity to meet people from IT security sphere and share the knowledge. Some interesting news were already mentioned on our forums. This post is not intended to discuss technical topics, it should rather show you the beauty of Geneva and Swiss Alps and let you see the ambience of some special VB events (cabaret etc). The galleries are located here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/sejtko/Geneva01#
http://picasaweb.google.com/michal.trs/SwissTourVB2009#
other galleries (or some slight changes) may follow in near future.
AV-Comparatives is one of the most respected antivirus comparison tests in the world and is performed twice a year. The latest test results were published over the weekend and we did very, very well. Although they never name an overall winner, I think if they did do so, we would have been the overall winner. At a minimum we handily beat virtually all of the premium products. This time around 16 products were tested including Symantec/Norton, McAfee, AVG, Avira, and Kaspersky. Read more…
Friday was moving day for us. For most of our company’s history, we have been in this building. We had the 2nd and 3rd floors (for Americans, that is the 3rd and 4th floors) in the building you see below. As you can tell, the building is not in the best of shape. Its windows were leaky, there was no air conditioning, and the elevator was quaint. But, it was a short walk to the metro and right on the tram lines. The basic problem though is that we did not have enough space—only about 800 square metres (9,000 square feet). We have been growing very rapidly and the building just did not have the space or connectivity that we needed. But it was home for many, many years and I am sure our staff will remember it fondly. Read more…
It has been a while since I have posted—we have been very busy moving into a new building, getting the new products out in beta form, and handling our first ever reseller meeting. But, thought it might be interesting to share some numbers:
- Number of free users—between 80 and 93 million. We have 93 million registered users and about 80 million of them have updated their virus definitions recently. Both numbers are of course huge. We think this is the 1st or 2nd largest security user base in the world. Read more…
We have spent the last week in the main Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA, making sure avast! works great on Windows 7. As a matter of fact, we have had two teams here working in parallel: one that takes care of interoperability issues (interoperability with both the new OS as well as other software applications) and one for the logo certification.
And what a week it was! Read more…