Security news12 March 2008
McAfee, Symantec or Sophos: Who is the best at virus detection, proactive protection and response? Independent comparison by AV-Test.org confirms quality of Sophos anti-malware solution
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."
- Learn more about the test on the AV-Test.org website
- See how well your anti-virus performed in AV-Test.org's malware detection test
- View a chart summary comparing the 30 different security products
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).
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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.
See also:
- Learn more about awards, independent comparative reviews, and tests of Sophos products
- McAfee, Sophos, Symantec: Who is the best at stopping zero-day attacks?
- Which anti-virus? Sophos beats McAfee and Symantec in an independent product review
- Proactive detection of unknown malware - a real test of anti-virus software
