May av-comparatives results out

??? Avast not very good
But better than many others.
Comments from the experts please
Also i thnk it was 4.7 tested whivh is a bit like drinking last weeks milk and then telling the milkman it was off!!! :o
I think augusts test will be the big ine with avg 8 and avast 4.8
Keep up the good work
:wink:

Av-comparatives runs two types of tests, this one is the Retrospective/ProActive Test and differes wildly to the On-demand tests that these do.

The Retrospective/ProActive Test is where the test is run with no signature updates from the test run in February, so your AV is effectively 3 months out of date. So any AVs that don’t use heuristics tend not to do so well in this regard. avast doesn’t use heuristics, but does use generic signatures trying to catch more than one malware variant with the one signature, so possibly less effective than those with heuristics (but that is only one aspect).

Am I worried about this set of results, No.

Why, because I never let my virus signatures get three months out of date. Not to mention I exercise safe hex, don’t open attachments of click links in unsolicited emails, that and a healthy degree of common sense along with a good back-up and recovery strategy.

:slight_smile: Great thanks for the reply
so av comparatives use software 3 months old ?
Seems a little daft to me. ???
Why would you not update ? :wink:
thanks for the advice and info.

No they have two different types of test, the on-demand test with fully up to date malware signatures and the retrospective test where it is three months old.

This is effectively testing heuristics or generic detections of AVs for new malware after the last on-demand test. This is quite a tough test, though for me I feel slightly artificial as I would never let my AV get so badly out of date.

Yes right but it let you understand how protected you are during “Zero-Day Attacks” … when a new virus is out… it can keep hours before:

  1. avast team discover it
  2. avast team fix it
  3. updates are relased
  4. user download updates.

Than i think they do this kind of test not just to make a joke… but it has a meaning.
Having an heuristic module could decrease work for avast team, because they will not have to care about some percentage of malware, antivirus will be able to block virus itself.

I hope to see heuristic in avast 5.0 i think an antivirus in 2008 shouldn’t have this weak point.

a.mutu10,

From what I have read in these forums, avast! 5 won’t have heuristics, instead it will have something similar to Threatfire.

Yes it is good… but i am quite unlucky because i already use threatfire + avast … so i already have a shield for behavor defense, but there is nothing i can download to improve heuristic of antivirus.

Anw every add layer of protection is always welcome

Excellent! :slight_smile:

If you have Avast and TF then why do you want ‘heuristic’ as well? If V5 employs a behaviour detector then you could drop TF.

Because to me… in computer antivirus security there are 3 layers

  1. signature
  2. behavor
  3. heuristic

i have number 1 with avast, number 2 with threatfire, what i miss is heuristic, for this i would prefer avast to have heuristic, anw a behavor protection is always welcome

it is not 3 months old, its practically max. 1 week old product against new malware appeared in that week (does anyone read the report at all?). it is just that the test is released months later because this type of testing needs a well test-set containing only new malware and exhaustive false alarm testing, which requires time also.

This is an interesting discussion.

What is the difference between heuristics and Threatfire’s approach?