Which antivirus is best at removing malware?

November 5th, 2009

Which antivirus is best at removing malware?

Posted by Dancho Danchev @ 12:14 pm

Detecting the presence of malicious code is one thing, successfully eradicating it is entirely another.

According to AV-Comparatives.org’s recently released malware removal test evaluating the effectiveness of sixteen antivirus solutions, only a few were able to meet their criteria of not only removing the FakeAV, Vundo, Rustock and ZBot(Zeus) samples they were tested against, but also getting rid of the potentially dangerous “leftovers” from the infection.

More info on the tested antivirus solutions , and how they scored:

The test, including the following antivirus solutions - Avast Professional Edition 4.8; AVG Anti-Virus 8.5; AVIRA AntiVir Premium 9.0; BitDefender Anti-Virus 2010; eScan Anti-Virus 10.0; ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4.0; F-Secure AntiVirus 2010; G DATA AntiVirus 2010; Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010; Kingsoft AntiVirus 9; McAfee VirusScan Plus 2009; Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0; Norman Antivirus & Anti-Spyware 7.10; Sophos Anti-Virus 7.6; Symantec Norton Anti-Virus 2010; Trustport Antivirus 2009, relied on a modest malware sample, whose prevalence is however easily seen in the wild these days.

More at: Which antivirus is best at removing malware? | Zero Day | ZDNet.com

You can rate one program over another all day long but the one best defense is simply having multiple layers of protection. I think that is what you were trying to point out there. Qdos

eScan, Symantec and Microsoft (MSE)
Those were the only good ones.

And my own Personal test can help back that up, too.

MSE Blocked 10/10 zero-day malware links! Good job!
Symantec Blocked 20/20 Zero-Day Malware links, though it DID let in two BOTH were caught a few seconds later by SONAR 2.

Never tested eScan, but maybe will later.

The thing to note about the article there is that there are different types of malwares to start with. Data miners, tracking "cookies", trojan downloaders, and other types of "bugs" fall into a different catagory then viruses. Even there you will find various types as well.

From the time the RCs went on having 5 sata drives in plus usb flash drives a full sweep prior to seeing the retail Ultimate go on and despite all of the various freewares, sharewares tried out from various sites not one bug turned up. This was all before the MS Essentials became availble.

The 3 main programs during that time were AVG 8.5 with the IE security toolbar which sounded an alert on a few sites, Spyware Terminator(not mentioned), and a recent new program System Protect(same co as ST). Probably the two items that did the most were the security toolbar on IE 8!