• Av-test Gmbh On Twitter What's The Best Av Software For Mac

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PCMag reviews products, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. Test results from independent labs around the world are invaluable in helping identify the best products. The vast majority of these tests focus on Windows/PC malware, though tests of Android protection are becoming more common. We hardly ever see Macintosh security products put to the test, so the just-published results from are very welcome. Well, perhaps not so welcome for some vendors, as detection rates ranged from 100 percent to less than 20 percent.

Few Samples It seems the Internet is awash in malware aimed at corrupting PCs and Android devices, while Macs get short shrift. Andreas Marx, AV-Test's CEO, laid out the immense disparity in malware prevalence between the platforms. 'Every day, we're registering more than 400,000 new malware for Windows and 5,000 new samples for Android,' said Marx. 'However, we're identifying less than 100 malicious Mac OS programs per month.'

Av-test Gmbh On Twitter What's The Best Av Software For Mac

That made a big difference in the number of malware samples used. A uses over 100,000 samples. The Mac antivirus test used just 117. 'Please note that the sample set is small,' noted Marx, 'so each sample has quite some influence on the percentages.' The collection included applications, scripts, and archives.

How They Tested Starting with the same drive image for each product, AV-Test researchers ran an on-demand scan and recorded how many samples were detected. They repeated the test a few days later, to see if new updates raised the scores. For the on-access test, they eliminated the archived samples. Many antivirus products don't scan archives on access, since the malware inside can't be executed until it's extracted. Using the 84 non-archived samples, they checked whether simple file access caused the antivirus to detect the file. As for false positives (erroneous identification of valid programs as malware) there's good news.

When confronted with the top 100 Mac applications, none of the tested products identified a single one as malicious. Big Winners, Big Losers, G Data Antivirus for Mac, and Norman Antivirus for Mac all detected 100 precent of the samples both in the on-demand test and the on-access test. Note: This article originally included eScan for Mac among the list of products that got 100 percent in both tests. In fact, eScan only earned 100 percent in the on-demand test. Eleven of the 18 products tested managed 90 percent or better. 'I think all products which are able to detect more than 90 percent of the malware used for the testing are good and can be recommended,' said Marx, 'and products scoring more than 95 percent can be considered to be very good and very effective.' At the other end of the scale, averaged 38.5 percent detection in the two tests, averaged 26.5 percent, and Webroot SecureAnywhere (for Mac) brought up the rear with an average of 19.7 percent detection.

Vendors Respond In a public statement, Webroot VP Patrick Kennedy said, 'While we are disappointed in the test results, we would like to assure our customers that they remain protected in real-world scenarios.' He went on to explain, 'We recently discovered a bug which we believe would negatively impact our efficacy in a test such as that run by AV-Test.

This is not to say the test was improperly run; it was an error in our product and has since been fixed.' In addition, Webroot's on-demand scan does not peer inside archives, since any malware would be detected by the on-access scanner before it could execute. 'We are adding the ability to scan these types of archive files for earlier detection of malware within them,' said Kennedy, 'and this functionality will be available in an upcoming release.' 'Currently we've focused our Mac detection on malware and PUA that our customers are seeing,' said a representative of Trend Micro.

'The test used samples that have not been found within our customer base, which we did not prioritize.' She pointed out that the product has many other layers of protection, layers that don't come into play in a simple file-detection test.

Even so, the company plans to do better. 'We've committed to having 100% detection of all missed samples by Monday, September 1,' she said. 'We are committed to improving our solution to ensure we perform better in future tests.'

McAfee VP Gary Davis also pointed out that other layers of protection need testing. 'McAfee remains intensely focused on protecting users from online threats,' said Davis. Even so, he allowed that static detection has some value. 'We are aware of the most recent AV Test results,' said Davis, 'and are working to optimize our Mac malware detection abilities in the similar manner we did on the PC side, where we have exhibited double digit improvement over the past year as is evidenced by our almost perfect score.' Here he's referring to AV-Test's on PC-based antivirus, in which McAfee earned 17.5 of 18 possible points. Symantec just wishes the researchers had chosen a different product version.

'While we would have preferred testing our 6.1 beta product that includes significant protection enhancements, AV-TEST evaluated an older version of Norton Internet Security for Mac,' explained my contact. 'We have requested an opportunity to test the 6.1 version to demonstrate the efficacy of our product.' Indeed, according to the detailed test results, AV-Test used version 5.6, which averaged 54.7 percent detection.

More Tests Needed The most innovative testing labs do their best to exercise all aspects of an antivirus product's performance. Captures real-world Web-based malware attacks and, using a replay system, subjects each tested product to precisely the same attack. The whole product dynamic test by also attempts to give all protection layers a chance. Fighting games for mac.

AV-Test's own standard evaluation of Windows-based antivirus includes dynamic protection. I definitely appreciate the current report from AV-Test, and it clearly shows that there's a big range of static detection rates in the Mac antivirus area.

But it would be premature to say that this test totally defines the quality of each product. The top scorers definitely did well; those at the bottom may have focused development efforts on other protective layers.