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Ukrainian Did Avast win the latest AV-Comparatives?
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.
AV-Comparatives is an interesting test because it measures all three elements a user should be looking at to choose the right AntiVirus product—the ability to detect malware; the ability to not falsely detect malware; and speed. So, the best product is not necessarily the one with the best detection—it is the one with the best blend of these three elements. These elements can be mutually exclusive and it is very hard to get top scores in each category. Products that detect a lot of malware can over-detect and have a lot of false positives which severely hinders users. A low number of false positives can imply a poor ability to detect malware. And it is very easy to do nothing very fast but increasing speed tends to lower the ability to detect malware.
AV-Comparatives assigns each product one of four scores: A+, A, Standard, and Tested (a nice euphemism for failed). To get an A+ one has to have 97% detection and fewer than 15 false positives.
This time around, we were the only AV product to score in the top-5 in each category (and no, that does not mean we were 5th in each category). We were #5 in Detection, #2 in False Positives, and #1 in Speed.
- Detect Malware. AV-Comparatives runs about 4 million malware samples through the products. One set of 2.5 million is old and they expect all products to detect them. Then they run a set of 1.5 million newer samples. To get a top score one must detect at least 97% of this second set. We scored a 98% for the #5 ranking. But, two of the higher detectors (Avira and McAfee) were downgraded for excessive False Positives. The top performer in this category was GData—a product that uses two AV engines (one of which is Avast) so it can maximize detections but at the expense of speed, false positives, and footprint. The only single engine A+ rated product with a higher detection than us was Norton and it was only slightly higher (98.3%). Many well known products such as Microsoft, AVG and Kaspersky failed to make the 97% threshold.
- Not detect false positives. If a product finds more than 15 false positives in the clean set, its score is lowered. This happened to us 6 months ago when we had too many false positives and we got downgraded from an A+ to an A. We spent a lot of time in the recent months upgrading our ability to not detect false positives—we added over 1TB and 150,000 files to our known clean set. The result was fantastic as we had only 5 false positives for the 2nd position and we were only 1 false positive behind the category leader. Some of the big names had tremendous problems this time around. McAfee with their “in the cloud” detection had 41 False Positives. Avira was downgraded to an A rating because of 21 false positives. Symantec barely made the A+ cutoff with 13 false positives.
- Process quickly (i.e. speed). We are usually in the top 1/3rd but we have been spending time optimizing our product and this time around we got the #1 position. Slightly behind us was Norton who has been heavily advertising the “Need for Speed”. We agree. Customers need speed—a fast product with high detection and few false positives. And that is Avast! Most competitors had speeds half of ours and some (such as Microsoft) were about three times slower.
So, were we the best overall? I think so. Check out the results for yourselves and make your own decision: www.av-comparatives.org. To find the report, click on the “On Demand Comparative August 2009″ link near the top right of the page.
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Congrats on winning the Advanced+ label!
AVAST is undoubtedly the best AV program available…I have been using it for years and without a single problem
Anxiously waiting for the roll out of Avast Home 5.0
Cheers!
I’ve been using AVAST 4.8 home for last 7-8 months and its the best
Congratulations.
I’m quite happy the point “speed” get huge improvements.
Hope the avast 5 do not lose the low false positives rates with the behavior shield.
The detection is quite good.
One suggestion (from the forums): get a better submission process.
Great news
This is great! Congrats to the whole team!!
Good score as usual. Congratulations!
I think, as Tech, that the sending of suspicious files and false positives should be improved.
A very important thing to improve: the ability to clean an infected pc (with active virus). It’s for this reason that products such as Avira, Malwarebyte’s.. are having success. Even from my personal test Avast! identify more threats than Avira, but Avast! removes less ones.
P.S.
Sorry for my english, I hope it is understandable.
If avast! 4.8 is very good……….. avast! 5 will be the best.
Vincent;
I’m an Avast fan, I have it installed on my home computer for more than 2 years, without any problem, so I tried it at office, we started with ADNM and Net Client Edition 4.7, we were working so fine at the beginning, we cleaned many viruses, but we found many other undetected by Avast, so I sent it to virus@avast.com with a http://www.virustotal.com report, after some days Alwil released a fix, then Alwil released Avast 4.8 version, that version wasn’t available for Enterprise users after 5 months… a lot of time, we found more viruses undetected, and we reported, then Alwil release a VPS that caused a problem with XP computers, sending to the chest Windows files, it was a really nightmare for our users, they stop working one day and a half (we are a 24X7 working company), some days ago, I sent other virus undetected bye Avast, your staff asked me to update my program version to 4.8.1351 in order to detect the virus, but my net client edition only can be upgraded to 4.8.1038, so what I’m going to do with that virus? Check this Home and Pro versions were updated on August 17th, but Server, ADNM and Net Client Edition were updated on May 13th, what I have to expect? Avast 5 will be released for Enterprise users on time? or we have to wait 5 months just like 4.8? It seems to me, that Alwil is not taking care of Enterprise users, here in México, we are running without a really good technical support. You have to improve it, we started to check other antivirus solutions because of this.
And again, as a home user, I’m an Avast fan, but as an enterprise user…
Sorry to be so crude.
Best Regards!
Sergio Ariza
Actually, I’d disagree here. Have you tried running the boot-time scan in avast? It’s one of avast’s major weapons when it comes to cleaning.
Congratulations to avast.
But my last experience with avast it isn’t a quite fast scanner.
I’ll use avast5 when it’s goes final.
A little off topic, but won’t you have anything in the blogs about the resellers meeting? Conclusions? Goals?
Hi Tech. Is another in my long list of replies I have to get done. I actually have a blog posting in a rough draft and some photos. Will be soon…and sooner than the other stuff I had promised you.
It’s great to hear such good news! Thank you so much guys for providing us wonderful and free product. may god bless all of you !
So when is there going to be a new 25% discount campaign?
I just received an Avast warning “suspicious whitespace sequence”–what does this mean–and what should I do?
Your home edition is wonderful–thanks!
iv been useing microsoft security essentials free beta its very stable and good in detection but when avast comes out to 5.0 ill switch.
This is a heuristic check of avast! mail scanner. It’s a suspicious email you’re receiving due to a long whitespace sequence in the name of the attached file. If I were you, I’ll delete that mail.
I’m waiting for the “other” stuff… although I’m not that sure we’re talking the same language, I mean, probably I’m expecting for one thing and you’re getting prepared for another… something is telling me we won’t match. Maybe by email.
@brad
Brad, MSE? Thanks for the vote of confidence on V5 but why not Avast 4.8? I am sure the current Avast is better than MSE at catching threats.
Hi avast team,
First of all, i’d like to congrats to all of your avast team.
All of you have a good job, keep your good job and performance for avast antivirus.
Regards,
Yanto Chiang
@Bernie Treichel
yes, Tech is right, It’s a suspicious email you’re receiving due to a long whitespace sequence in the name of the attached file. Please check http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=2256.0 for details.
you can always try to play Heuristics in avast Internet mail or Outlook/Exchange provider in Resident protection if you like.
1) Click on the blue a-ball icon in system tray to show the
Resident protection settings
2) Click on the DETAILS button
3) In left pane, click on Internet mail or Outlook/Exchange provider icon
4) In right pane, click on CUSTOMIZE
5) Then do the changes you want
congratulations to whole avast team …. i am really proud to be a avast user
its great to see avast in top list
avast is wonderful and its fetures are subhan-allah (fantastic)
the subscibers who r using avast, which firewall u r using?
reply fast
@PB
Being a symantec vendor, i would respectfully disagree. The latest 2010 norton products are awesome and beat the competition hands down.
Hello to all ! I recently installed the avist home version, when I plugged my usb from my printer to my laptop it said Malware? Not sure what I should have done But it did not give me any option but to delete?? I just Xed out of it, is this normal? Thank you all
also I read that the (avist globe i con) is suppose to be spinning? Mine is not
It is not necessarily supposed to spin all the time. If you right click the blue icon and select Details…>> you will be able to see what Avast! is scanning or what it scanned last. If you have any more problems go to the forum (http://forum.avast.com/) where your questions will be answered speedily by volunteers.
Hi James. Glad a Symantec vendor is reading our blog. As you may know, I spent 8 years there in very senior positions. Here at Alwil/Avast we believe in top notch security protection without all the hype. We don’t name our features. We don’t work the journalists to get publicity. We just deliver top notch security for free to 93 million users. As a result we probably have 2x as many users as Symantec/Norton. I would put our product up against a Norton/Symantec product any day. I know you need to represent what you sell but dig into the details. Norton is much much better than it was a few years ago; it is now a good product. But Avast is a great product. If you ever encounter examples of what Norton finds that Avast does not, let me know. And if you want to explore selling our products, just let us know.
@Simran
Thank You I did as you said & it spins when needed..
#1 in memory leaks?
Hi Visitor. I would bet there is not a meaningful PC software product that has not had memory leaks. With just a simple Google search, Avast has the 2nd fewest hits on memory leak as a search term. I checked Avast against Avira, NOD, McAfee, Norton, Trend, AVG and Kaspersky. And given the fact that we have anywhere from 1x – 5x as many users as these other products, this is pretty darn good. So yes, we have had memory leak problems but no where near the problem that other products have had.
google search:
“memory leak avast” -> 10.200 results for 93 Million users (according to you)
“memory leak avira” -> 8.660 results for 100 Million ‘free’ users (according to their website)
“memory leak kaspersky” -> 24.900 results for over 250 Million users (according to their website)
I picked these 3 randomly. So I guess ‘nowhere near’ isn’t really true…
@Frug
Ok maybe the KAV numbers are wrong, they state 250 Mio “protected users”, which includes pretty much everyone behind a gateway…. so ignore these numbers
Here are the ones I ran. Avira has fewest. Avast is #2. To me that is “no where near”. Also the Kaspersky user numbers cannot be believed. There are only 1 billion computers in the world; they do not have Kaspersky on 25% of them. They are probably measuring mailboxes protected on ISPs, corporate networks, etc. Their consumer users I would bet are below 10 million.
Norton memory leak 45,600
Trend Micro 27,999
Kaspersky 20,200
AVG 187,000 (this is way too large but AVG is too generic as a search term)
McAfee 20,000
Symantec 30,300
Avira 6,850
NOD 19,200
Sophos 13,100
Having checked the google query for avast! (OK, a few pages, not all of the results
), almost all of them are ONE SINGLE entry from avast! changelog, copied into hundreds of web pages.
So, this kind of measuring is completely ridiculous (even if the other results, e.g. various questions from antivirus users, had any relevance – which I seriously doubt).
In any case, a new program update (4.8.1356) has now been released, and it solves the leak issue. Thanks.
Hello,
Just want to say that AVAST is the BEST hands down.
Guys if anyone is reading this BUY BUY BUY……IT is worth every penny….your system doesnt even know its there and it REALLY protects you.
I have tried ALL anti Virus products on the market and THIS is by far the best product I have used !!
I have the PRO and Windows Home Server Edition.
Thank you AVAST, and please keep up the good work and of course thank you for listing to OUR NEEDS !!!!
Hi!
I am a user with free Avast for over 2 years and recently acquired license to pay, because I was not satisfied with the free version and I want to support the development of an excellent program! Avast from I’ll never change! Thanks all Avast team.
Sorry my poor English. Thanks from Finland!
I have Avast Professional 4.8 antivirus program on my home computer. Do I need anything else or is this sufficient?
Thank you for a wonderful product. I have installed Avast! on all our computers since the others didn’t work too well. I do have to admit that Avast! was the last we thought of, but are very happy now and it’s all to your hard work and diligence. Again, many thanks!
@PB
did you guys also know that avast scans very slowly. it doesn’t speak well of the product. i hope the makers will do something about it. also the interface for the warning when a virus is detected isn’t that attractive, they should try some new look. holla!!!!!!!!!
hi…
i am using avast for 2 years /
Note : if u want best accuracy > u should goto folder option and unchecked >> Hide Protected Ope…. then avast see easy and accuracy is 99%
Good luck avast team
Hi, I am sorry to realize that we are seeing more and more pop ups from Alwil. For example from the year 2006 to 2009 I saw only one but this year several (one about this blog). I hope that Alwil has not changed its philosophy. If it has I think some people will use, for example, Microsoft Security Essentials as that does not at all bother the user.
Björn Lundahl
Gothenburg, Sweden
Even the silence is an answer.
Hi Vincent,I’m sorry for the little OFF TOPIC but…do you have any news about avast5?? Is it ready? Can we hope you to put it on the market for the first half of october?
Thanks
OK, I have rewritten this posting several times for those that read quickly. Decided the simple answer is the best. First Bjorn, pardon our slowness but you did post on a Sunday and today (Monday) is a holiday here in the Czech Republic.
The issue seems to be are we doing too much iNews? How about some other opinions? This is our way of communicating (NOT Selling) with our users. We have done 3-4 this year. Is that too much? Are they useful? What would you like to see?
And Bjorn, I would hope that someone would not leave avast and use MSE over iNews. The first thing a security product should do is protect the user. OneCare (and MSE) got 14th out of 16 in this AV Comparatives–and just barely missed flunking the detection.
@wonder
Wonder, there will be a soft launch of the free V5 in October with a partner. The official launch of all three free products will be a little bit later. We are finalizing the release schedule in the next week. Also, there should be new betas posted any day now.
Great V5 i wait for the launch.
I used the Beta and is running good on my Win7
@Jeanne Dean
Jeanne,
Whether you need something else depends on what you do with your computer. If you are just doing email and web browsing, the free AV is sufficient. But you should make sure your Windows firewall is turned on. If you are doing banking online, using credit cards online, etc. you need to make absolutely sure you have a firewall. The upcoming V5 Internet Security Suite will integrate the AV with a firewall and would be your best choice in the future.
@nismoh
Nismoh, I am not sure where your comment on scan speed comes from. Are you sure you have all set up correctly. The AV Comparatives should us having the fastest scan speed. I would suggest redoing the scan and then contacting tech support if you think there is an issue.
And I think you will be happy with the V5 changes on the screens.
I am able update Avast 4 Pro to next Avast 5 Pro without Avast 4 Uninstall? Sorry my bad English!
Seems like Symantec and Avast are numbers 1 and 2…
@hpguru
Yes hpguru, you can install Avast 5 without removing Avast 4