Monday, February 19, 2007

Testing Free Antiviruses – Avast, AntiVir, AVG

The main criterion of an estimation of reliability of antivirus programs usually consider level of finding as them of viruses and other nocuous programs, and also speed of reaction to virus threats. It is important, that the antivirus possessed fast speed of scanning of data and was simple and convenient in job. We have compared the most known free antiviruses and have solved what of them cope with this better.

Avast! 4.7 Home Edition

Antivirus Avast!, developed by the Czech company Alwil Software, exists in variants as for home users (Free Home Edition), and for corporate clients (Professional Edition).

Avast! Home Edition includes the anti-virus scanner and the mechanism of resident protection of system (protection in a mode of real time) which can scan memory of a computer, and also all started, changeable and saved files with the purpose of revealing of a virus before he will infect a computer. Functions of resident protection carry out some separate modules which, besides traditional protection of file system, carry out the control over messages the Internet-pagers (ICQ, AIM, Trillian and some other), programs for peer-to-peer networks of type P2P (Kazaa and others - all more than 30 names) and for mail clients.

Avira AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic 7.5

Free antivirus and very popular in the world for home (individual and noncommercial) users. AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic it is developed by German company Avira. The antivirus provides protection of local system against viruses, the trojan horses, worms and other undesirable programs, for example Costly Dialers, jokes, keyboard spies and other, is far not such and harmless programs.

In arsenal AntiVir there is a majority of the functions accessible in commercial antiviruses:
- Resident protection against viruses at loading files;
- Viewing and restoration of the files damaged by macro viruses;
- Protection against any (including in advance unknown) loading and macro viruses;
- An opportunity of work under the schedule;
- Automatic updating versions of the program and anti-virus bases through the Internet.

Grisoft AVG Anti-virus Free Edition 7.5

Program AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition from Czech company Grisoft also possesses a sufficient set of the properties peculiar to qualitative complex means of protection which number includes an opportunity of constant monitoring of system, including check of e-mail and automatic updating through the Internet.

The program is can not only to find, but also to treat the files infected by viruses, effectively cooperates with firewalls of other manufacturers (for example, with Kerio Personal, Zone Alarm Pro and Windows XP), that allows to protect reliably a computer from every possible the Internet-threats.

Technique of testing

To understand, what antivirus approaches for protection of a personal computer against infection with nocuous programs is better, we shall spend the small test. In each tested antivirus the task of scanning on demand of the catalogue containing a collection of specially selected viruses was started. As developers anti-virus ON constantly update bases of the products, and the quantity of viruses recognized by known programs aspires to 100% it be no point to spend testing by a principle "a maximum quantity of determined viruses". For this reason in a collection the small amount enough last samples of the viruses going on the Internet last half a year has been used only.

Virus copies from a collection have been allocated on following categories:

Windows - viruses of kind Win.* - 65 viruses;
Script - BAT, HTML, Java, Scripts, VBS, WBS, Worms, PHP and Perl - 93 viruses;
Trojan - Trojan and Backdoor - 79 viruses.
Total - 237 viruses.

All Antiviruses at the moment of testing had last versions with the updated bases. In all cases options by default were used. It has been added only "to check all files" and the heuristic analysis (there where there were such functions) is switched on. As the standard the package took part in testing Kaspersky Anti-Virus Pro 6.0.1 which is being on in the lead positions among commercial antiviruses.


Testing

The information on the found out viruses to each of participants of testing are presented in the table.

Antivirus: Windows Script Trojan of All
Kaspersky 65 93 79 237
Avast! 63 78 77 218
AntiVir 55 89 79 223
AVG 62 83 67 212

Antivirus Avast! at all simplicity concerning system resources combines in itself practically all useful qualities "commercial broters", such as good functionality of the basic components and operative updating of anti-virus bases.

Program AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic which is in the lead by quantity of revealed viruses, has to small problems of the mechanism of updating, for the beginning user will not be the best choice.

Last participant of testing - AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition has not left about itself strong impression, and results he has shown the worst and in all rest did not differ from competitors.

It turns out, that modern free antiviruses are still difficult for comparing to the best commercial products - the full victory in the test of the Kaspersky Anti-Virus about testifies. But, Free programs lag behind not too strongly, their results quite good, and functionalities are sufficient for home using.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing your experience