IT security and control firm Sophos has been found in an
independent test to be superior to Symantec and McAfee at
protecting proactively against zero-day malware attacks, detection
of known malware, spyware and adware, and responding quickly to new
widespread attacks.
AV-Test.org tested 30 different anti-virus products on Windows
XP (Service Pack 2) to see how well they detected 1,130,556 unique
malware samples. Sophos accurately detected 98.1% of the malware
achieving a rating of "very good", and outperforming McAfee (95.6%)
and Symantec (95.7%) who were labelled as "good".
In addition, Sophos received a ranking of "very good" when it
came to proactive detection of new, unknown malware, compared to a
rating of "good" for McAfee and Symantec.
According to the test results released by AV-Test.org, Sophos
also outperformed Symantec and McAfee when it came to response time
to new widespread malware. Both McAfee and Symantec have been
ranked as "satisfactory" with a typical response time of 4-6 hours,
compared to Sophos's "good" 2-4 hours.
"Sophos continues to innovate and improve the techniques used to
protect against viruses, Trojans, spyware, adware and other
threats. It's particularly gratifying to see Sophos praised for
being 'very good' at detecting unknown malware,"
said Guy Edsall, product manager at Sophos. "Sophos received high
scores across the board. Combining these excellent protection
capabilities with Sophos's underlying philosophy of simple
management has been the driver behind many companies switching from
Symantec and McAfee to Sophos."
About AV-Test.org
AV-Test.org is a project of the
Business-Information-Workgroup at the Institute of Technical and
Business Information Systems at the Otto-von-Guericke-University
Magdeburg (Germany) in cooperation with AV-Test GmbH. At regular
intervals AV-Test.org tests anti-virus, anti-spyware and personal
firewall software on behalf of producers and magazines. Within the
scope of product certification AV-Test.org works together with the
tekit Consult Bonn GmbH (TÜV Saarland group).
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.