What Antivirus do we recommend?

In November we blogged about all the new viruses we have been detecting. It's a great article if you haven't had a chance to read it yet!

Last month we detected many new viruses. For example the image below from VirusTotal.com shows the score breakdown of a file we recently submitted.

The community score of -2 and community comments means 1 person before us has detected the virus.

Only 3 of 55 antiviruses are currently able to detect this virus so your chances of being infected by it are high. The score will now improve rapidly as the other 52 will use the uploaded file to fill in their detection gaps. Within a matter of hours or days at most, this virus should have full coverage across the major antivirus engines.

Largnet has been collecting the results of all these new viruses we discovered and which antivirus detected them to get an accurate measurement of antivirus performance. An essential feature of antivirus software is it's ability to detect new viruses as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, the results are time sensitive. These antivirus engines may be the best right now, but results change often so the landscape in 6 months will be vastly different. We will continue collecting this data so we can keep you apprised of changes in future blogs.

New virus detections

Our data currently ranks Dr Web, Kaspersky, and Zone Alarm as the best with Avast/AVG, Eset, and Fortinet as runners up.

Eset recently released a report identifying a significant number of new Linux based virus families. Check out this ZDNet article for highlights of their discovery.

This kind of effort by Eset is why they rank so well for their early detection performance.