New AV Comparatives Results Out: My Take On The Antivirus Vendors

I am still busy with academic stuffs when i thought i should de-stress myself with a blog post. AV Comparatives has just released their Retrospective/Proactive Test for May 2010 and i thought I would share it around. 

The test result gave me a surprise: Of all the antivirus vendors, Trustport Antivirus 2010 is actually the overall winner, dethroning the usual past winners Avira & G DATA from the top spot. Panda Antivirus did well too (Panda Cloud Antivirus also uses the same engine, albeit in the cloud), but unfortunately it has too much false positive. Bitdefender & the other antivirus using the Bitdefender engine ( G DATA, F-Secure) also did well, too; previously the Bitdefender engine failed to impress on AV Comparatives.


Amongst the freeware, Microsoft Security Essential did the best, with Avira a close second. However, the real disappointment lays with Avast! v5; I thought that Avast! is a pretty solid freeware antivirus but this time, even the weaker AVG outperforms it in proactive detection.


All in all, this result has its own weakness and is thus, suitable only for general reference as to how an antivirus may perform in real-life. For example, i was let down by AV Comparatives' decision to use NOD32 Antivirus v4 when the 4.2 version has already been long released. If you read through the report, you will also realized that some of the antivirus (example, F-Secure) are not tested with its maximum detection potential, meaning to say that their final result are not as accurate as it might be. AV Comparatives' tests are also not as large-scale as the VB100 tests as you can see, some similarly popular antivirus vendors are not even been tested (like Sunbelt Vipre, Rising Antivirus, Agnitum Outpost & Sophos).
 
If you are interested in comparing the current proactive test results with past tests, you can visit AV Comparatives' test reports archive.