AV-TEST certification earned with perfect score
Avira earned a perfect 18/18 score, topping all three major categories of testing:
- To evaluate the protection against malware infections (such as viruses, worms or Trojan horses), the testers took into consideration the protection against 0-day malware attacks, inclusive of web and e-mail threats (Real-World Testing) but also the detection of widespread and prevalent malware discovered in the last 4 weeks.
- Performance was under the scope as well with the average impact of the security product on the speed of the computer in daily use cases: visiting websites, downloading software, installing and running programs or copying data.
- Finally, the testers focused on the usability of the products by counting disruptions caused by false positives and false warning messages (false warnings or blockages when visiting websites, false detections of legitimate software as malware during a system scan and false warnings or blockages of certain actions carried out whilst installing and using legitimate software).
The results show an increase of 1.5 points compared to the last round of testing, evolution observed by Journalists as well. Avira becomes the best antivirus for Windows, offering users protection, performance and usability at the highest level.
Great level of Self-Protection
This time, AV-Test experts ran also a test to evaluate the self-protection of 32 security solutions for both consumers and businesses. The goal was to establish if these applications are adopting protection technologies like DEP (Data Execution Prevention) and ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) for their own use and how well they perform from this point of view. Avira occupied a top position in this area as well, with an average use of 99.7% in 32 and 64 bit versions.
To understand the importance of the self-protection factor in Antivirus Software, it’s useful to know that DEP uses CPU features to mark certain areas of the device’s memory as not executable while ASLR randomly locates executable code at load time. DEP and ASLR can thus protect against buffer overflow exploits and attempts to execute privileged code at known locations in memory.
We recommend Larry Seltzer’s analysis for a more in-depth understanding of the AV-TEST Self-Protection Results.
Your security: a long term commitment for our experts
Every successful test and earned certification shows how our antivirus is continuously evolving to face the digital challenges of today. It is a proof of strength and commitment of our teams towards millions of customers who trust us to secure their devices. Our experts will keep applying the best methods to discover, classify and detect new malicious applications until online safety becomes the natural state of things.
