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28 Jan 1998

100% detection rate secures Sophos certification ahead of Dr. Solomon's and McAfee

Sophos Anti-Virus receives new Virus Bulletin award.

Sophos Anti-Virus for Windows 95 has attained the new VB 100% award. The endorsement is given free of charge to products detecting 100% of viruses in a specially devised independent test.

In a comparative review, Virus Bulletin magazine, which tested twenty products including Dr Solomon's AVTK and McAfee VirusScan, found that Sophos's product detected 100% of viruses in its 'In the Wild' test set.

Unlike other tests, Virus Bulletin uses the current WildList to carry out antivirus software analysis. The product must detect all viruses listed on the WildList at the time of the deadline for product entries.

Uniquely, Virus Bulletin does not require vendors to pay for certification. If the software detects 100% of the viruses in the tests, the award is given.

"Because we don't believe companies should have to pay for certification, we are delighted that this award has been made based solely on the ability of our products to do the job," said Jan Hruska, technical director at Sophos. "The fact that several well-known antivirus companies failed to meet the standard set by Virus Bulletin, confirms our fears about the negligible value of commercial certification."

"Products are tested as submitted," said Nick FitzGerald, editor of Virus Bulletin. "Those that fail to detect all samples in our 'In the Wild' test sets are not given the VB 100% award. In this case, only three vendors achieved the necessary standards. Unlike some other tests, vendors do not get a chance to re-test their products to improve detection rates." For further details, please contact technical@sophos.com, tel: 01235 559933.

About Sophos

More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.

Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.