We all know that G Data uses both Bitdefender and Avast engine. But in their GUI says about engine A & B. According to them Engine A is better than Engine B.
Engine A: Detection (Very Good), Performance (Very Good)
Engine B: Detection (Good), Performance (Optimum)
See the image
So, I tried to sort out the identity of the engines (A & B)
Firstly let me say that G Data allows user to use either both engines/engine A/engine B as their Resident Scanner/On-Demand Scanner.
I downloaded a virus malware.zip (password protected) in the computer.
Extracted it after providing the password, G Data quarantines it. At that time it was using engine A as their Resident Scanner. The threat was detected as Win32.Generic.493869 .
Next time I used engine B as the resident scanner. Then the threat was detected as Win32:Rontokbr-I2 .
Lastly I used both engines as their resident scanner, the threat was detected as Win32.Generic.493869 .
So, it became clear that Engine A is G Data’s primary engine & if it fails to detect anything engine B comes into play.
Now, to ensure the identity of the engines I uploaded the file in Virustotal and found that Avast detects that as Win32:Rontokbr-I2 and Bitdefender as Win32.Generic.493869 .
So, Bitdefender is their Engine A & Avast is Engine B. http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/70d98b736c32160617e8e272c2f5b2c10c72789fe40e27ec16f94ffa09394cd7-1269026931
What’s then… I decided to share it with you. I was not surprised that G Data uses Bitdefender as their primary engine. It’s upto them obviously. But is it good to distinguish the two engines as Very Good/Good or Very Good/Optimum ?
If you run both engines, it is obviously going to stop when the first engine detects it and reports it (not necessarily the first one to scan it).
In the case of both engines being able to detect the sample then it would alert on the first engine. So the order they are run is I guess important, now I don’t know how they come about their Very Good/Good categorisations. I’m sure that they don’t publish how they arrive at their categorisation, but if it is based on which engine detect more then that would be swayed by which one runs first. In this instance BD is detecting by generic signature whilst avast has detected on a specific signature.
This is clearly shown on the VT results page you gave as both can detect the same sample but it can only report one detection.
As far as I’m aware GData isn’t yet using the avast5 engine, so we would have to see, but the integration of the engines into GData is I believe very different to the stand alone version of avast 5.0.
These two AVs aren’t so widely different in my opinion and av-comparatives for them to be rated Very Good and only Good, but they have to have some difference for the user to choose.
one thing to consider is the settings they use in each engine. then it is the version they use and lastly the real time monitor will depend on the active time reaction to each engine. I believe Bitdefender and avast are really not much different obviously Avast has better in behavior and not so buggy compared to BD
yes I found Bitdefender buggy too and too much resource intensive, when compared to Avast. Also detection/false positive wise they are very similar.
But one thing I have to say that BD is more frequent to provide updates, almost once in an hour.
I hated updates when I was game playing with 4.8 but Avast 5 Pro that I now use has that nice silent mode—but the computer guy who switched me into Avast quite some time ago, did so because it also used less computer resources than my prior program Norton—I really don’t want something that slows down my performance appreciably and so would that not also be a consideration?
It can mean either, shock at the cost of the product or amazement at the price of the product, shock in its too expensive or amazement that it is cheap.
On demand Scanner of Bitdefender is free, not realtime scanner. G-Data have their own web protection which is for IE and FF dependent on Plugin. No ip protection like Avast. I use chrome, so, not good for me.
They have to pay Alwil software and Bitdefender to use their engines, though they won’t be paying the full price of the pro/paid versions of those engines.
