2020 Antivirus Update
We last updated the on-going antivirus battle in June. We also reset the counters last time to remove historical bias so it’s update time! Let’s see how we did!
The holidays inspire a significant increase in activity, a trend we noted last year too. However this year was 3 times worse! We collected roughly 7,000 samples totaling about 18 gigabytes of data and uploaded them to VirusTotal. VirusTotal provides uploaded samples to various antivirus vendors who add them to their products to ensure they are detected sooner.
New Virus Detections
Fortinet took a surprising lead over ESET by 400 virus detections, with AVG less than 100 back of second place.
AVG and Avast should be identical given they are the same antivirus but their totals differ by 77 viruses. This may be explained by the fact that VirusTotal machines are not all updated at exactly the same time. The AVG scanner could be 30 minutes ahead of Avast in terms of signature updates and this alone could account for this discrepancy of 2.5%
Zone Alarm and Kaspersky are still running a dead heat. They are only 3 viruses apart after 6+ months, that’s closer than AVG and Avast but not entirely unexpected because they are partners.
ClamAV is doing fantastically. Cisco purchased Clam many years ago and has made great improvements to the product.
Great job to all the top 15 Antivirus who are all performing very well.
Performance isn’t Everything
Fortinet apparently left some backdoors in their products open. Though they are fixing these issues, this news should give potential buyers pause.
Not to be left out, AVG and Avast, both in the top 8, have been reprimanded by the online community for spying on their users. Google even removed these extensions from the Chrome web store. Avast is taking steps to address this concern and issued the following statement:
“Privacy is our top priority and the discussion about what is best practice in dealing with data is an ongoing one in the tech industry. We have never compromised on the security or privacy of personal data. We are listening to our users and acknowledge that we need to be more transparent with our users about what data is necessary for our security products to work, and to give them a choice in whether they wish to share their data further and for what purpose. We made changes to our extensions including limiting the use of data and these changes are explained clearly in our Privacy Policy. Our browser extensions Avast Online Security and AVG Online Security are back on the Chrome Store, and on the Mozilla Store (since 12/17). It’s important to us that users understand that we’re listening to concerns about transparency and data use, and striving to do better and lead by example in this area.”
Avast shutting down this subsidiary.
Their mea culpa highlights a critical part of software selection: do your research before buying a product. No one will ever be as invested in protecting your data as you are.