1. Antivirus Ratings Consumer Reports

Avira Free Anti-Virus recommended by Consumer Reports. Consumer Reports News: March 08, 2012 10:38 AM. Find Ratings. View and compare all Antivirus Software ratings.

1. AVG Anti-Virus Free 2012 is PCMag's new Editors' Choice for free antivirus. Skip to main content. More Antivirus reviews: First Looks; Computer and Product.
2. Feb 02, 2018 PC Magazine provides up-to-date coverage and product reviews of antivirus software.

Rubenking The Best Antivirus Protection of 2018 Antivirus software is critical for every PC. Without it, you risk losing your personal information, your files, and even the cash from your bank account. We've tested more than 40 utilities to help you pick the right one for your computers. Malware, Spyware, and Adware Protection It's a sparkling new year. Did you make any resolutions? Here's one to consider.

Resolve to install antivirus protection if you don't have it. If you're already protected, resolve to check on your antivirus to make sure it's working and fully updated.

These resolutions are a lot easier to keep than 'go to the gym more' or 'lose 20 pounds,' and you really do need the protection. Without it, a malicious hacker might drain what's left in your bank account, or enlist your shiny new computer as a zombie soldier in a botnet army.

Not sure which antivirus is best for you? We can help there, as we've reviewed more than 40 utilities in this category. I did say antivirus, but in truth it's unlikely you'll get hit with an actual. Malware these days is about making money, and there's no easy way to cash in on spreading a virus. Ransomware and data-stealing Trojans are much more common, as are bots that let the bot-herder rent out your computer for nefarious purposes.

Antivirus Ratings Consumer Reports

Modern antivirus utilities handle Trojans, rootkits, spyware, adware, ransomware, and more. PCMag has reviewed more than 40 different commercial antivirus utilities, and that's not even counting the many. Out of that extensive field we've named four Editors' Choice products. Several other commercial antivirus utilities proved effective enough to earn an excellent four-star rating. I eliminated two special-purpose products that aren't really like the rest: Daily Safety Check Home Edition and VoodooSoft VoodooShield.

Also, Check Point's ZoneAlarm PRO uses antivirus licensed from Kaspersky, with almost no lab test results for ZoneAlarm itself. That leaves the ten excellent products you see above.

If, one of these products should do the job. All of them are traditional, full-scale, antivirus tools, with the ability to scan files for malware on access, on demand, or on schedule. As for just relying on the antivirus built into Windows 8.x or Windows 10, that may not be the best idea. In the past, Windows Defender has performed poorly both in our tests and independent lab tests It's improving; it earneddecent scores in some recent tests. Even so, our latest evaluation indicates that you'd still be better off with a third-party solution.

Mosby's medical nursing and allied health. Listen to the Labs I take the results reported by independent antivirus testing labs very seriously. The simple fact that a particular vendor's product shows up in the results is a vote of confidence, of sorts. It means the lab considered the product significant, and the vendor felt the cost of testing was worthwhile. Of course, getting good scores in the tests is also important. I follow four labs that regularly release detailed reports: (the successor to Dennis Technology Labs), and. I also note whether vendors have contracted with ICSA Labs and West Coast labs for certification. I've devised a system for aggregating their results to yield a rating from 0 to 10.

We Test Malware, Spyware, and Adware Defenses. I also subject every product to my own hands-on test of malware protection, in part to get a feeling for how the product works. Depending on how thoroughly the product prevents malware installation, it can earn up to 10 points for malware protection. My malware protection test necessarily uses the same set of samples for months. To check a product's handling of brand-new malware, I test each product using 100 extremely new malware-hosting URLs supplied by, noting what percentage of them it blocked. Products get equal credit for preventing all access to the malicious URL and for wiping out the malware during download. Some products earn absolutely stellar ratings from the independent labs, yet don't fare as well in my hands-on tests.

In such cases, I defer to the labs, as they bring significantly greater resources to their testing. Want to know more?

You can dig in for a detailed description of. Multilayered Malware Protection Antivirus products distinguish themselves by going beyond the basics of on-demand scanning and real-time. Some rate URLs that you visit or that show up in search results, using a red-yellow-green color coding system. Some actively block processes on your system from connecting with known malware-hosting URLs or with fraudulent (phishing) pages. Software has flaws, and sometimes those flaws affect your security. Prudent users keep Windows and all programs patched, fixing those flaws as soon as possible. The vulnerability scan offered by some antivirus products can verify that all necessary patches are present, and even apply any that are missing.

Spyware comes in many forms, from hidden programs that log your every keystroke to Trojans that masquerade as valid programs while mining your personal data. Any antivirus should handle spyware, along with all other types of malware, but some include specialized components devoted to. You expect an antivirus to identify and eliminate bad programs, and to leave good programs alone.

What about unknowns, programs it can't identify as good or bad? Behavior-based detection can, in theory, protect you against malware that's so new researchers have never encountered it. However, this isn't always an unmixed blessing. It's not uncommon for behavioral detection systems to flag many innocuous behaviors performed by legitimate programs. Whitelisting is another approach to the problem of unknown programs. A whitelist-based security system only allows known good programs to run. Unknowns are banned.

This mode doesn't suit all situations, but it can be useful. Sandboxing lets unknown programs run, but it isolates them from full access to your system, so they can't do permanent harm. These various added layers serve to enhance your protection against malware.

Firewalls, Ransomware Protection, and More Firewalls and spam filtering aren't common antivirus features, but some of our top products include them as bonus features. In fact, some of these antivirus products are more feature-packed than certain products sold as security suites. Among the other bonus features you'll find are secure browsers for financial transactions, secure deletion of sensitive files, wiping traces of computer and browsing history, credit monitoring, virtual keyboard to foil keyloggers, cross-platform protection, and more. You'll even find products that enhance their automatic malware protection with the expertise of human security technicians. And of course I've already mentioned sandboxing, vulnerability scanning, and application whitelisting. I'm seeing more and more antivirus products adding modules specifically designed for.

Some work by preventing unauthorized changes to protected files. Others keep watch for suspicious behaviors that suggest malware.

Some even aim to reverse the damage. Given the growth of this scourge, any added protection is beneficial. What's the Best Malware Protection? Which antivirus should you choose? You have a wealth of options. Kaspersky Anti-Virus and Bitdefender Antivirus Plus invariably rate at the top in independent lab tests. In my hands-on tests, Norton AntiVirus Basic outscored every other recent product except Webroot.

A single subscription for McAfee AntiVirus Plus lets you install protection on all of your Windows, Android, Mac OS, and iOS devices. And its unusual behavior-based detection technology means Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus is the tiniest antivirus around. We've named these five Editors' Choice for commercial antivirus, but they're not the only products worth consideration. Read the reviews of our top-rated products, and then make your own decision. Note that I reviewed many more antivirus utilities than I could include in the chart of top products.

If your favorite software isn't listed there, chances are I did review it. You can see all the relevant reviews on PCMag's. All the software listed in this feature are Windows antivirus apps. If you're a macOS user, don't despair, however; PCMag has a separate roundup dedicated solely to the.

The Top 10 Best Antivirus Software 2018 Choosing the perfect antivirus program is a tough task, with so many companies now available and all with different features and pricing. Luckily we have done the hard work for you and compiled a list of the best antivirus programs in the market based on extensive research and careful consideration.

We have both big names and some less recognisable names which are really taking the antivirus market by storm. By using our comparison tools we hope to help you choose the best antivirus software for your needs. You can also check out user reviews of each company as well as our expert take on them, to help you get a genuine feel for how easy to use and helpful each option you have is. The security software industry is worth around $100 billion dollars, so there is certainly room for some big companies and great stories.

The biggest company in the security software space is Symantec, the company behind Norton Internet Security and antivirus products, is valued at a cool $16 billion dollars and turns over $6 billion annually. Symantec had humble beginnings, founded by Gary Hendrix in 1982 with a grant from the National Science Foundation. In 1984, it was acquired by another software company, C&E Software, starting a long line of acquisition for the then small business.

C&E Software adopted the Symantec name and worked through ‘til November 1985 to the release of their first big product, Q&A. In July of 1989, following success of the Q&A product, Symantec had its IPO. Fast forward to 2000, after hundreds of millions of dollars worth of acquisitions and massive growth, Symantec makes their biggest acquisition to date in acquiring AXENT Technologies in a deal worth almost $1 billion. In 2016, Symantec are to split Veritas software from the company (who they acquired for over $13.5 billion dollars in 2005). The biggest story in the antivirus space is the overwhelming success of Qihoo 360 security, who are the makers of the ultra-popular 360 security mobile apps on iOS and android. For such an unrecognisable brand name in the western world, you would not expect their net worth to be anywhere near the reported $10 billion. The worth becomes understandable when you realise that they have an active user base of well over 100 million per day.

When they released their app in India, it was downloaded over 10 million times in just 3 weeks! The app is completely free, the way it is monetized is through advertising. At the end of 2014, the company had over 1 billion users over desktop and mobile. The biggest company involved with antivirus software is undoubtedly Microsoft, who maintain a 20% market share in the security software industry. This large market share is mostly thanks to it’s huge product ‘Microsoft Security Essentials’, which is available to download free of charge if you use a Windows operating system.

Microsoft Security Essentials is the most popular antivirus product in North America, and the second most popular in the world. When the product first launched, it was quickly dismissed by other antivirus brands like McAfee and Kaspersky, who claimed the product was inferior to their own and would hold at a measly 2% market share. Who’s the fastest growing antivirus company today? That would be Bitdefender.

Thanks to the production of quality products and aggressive marketing, Bitdefender have been able to slowly grow their company to a user base of over half a billion and are on their way to becoming the first company ever from Romania to go public. The company is relatively new compared to other big names in the space (for example, McAfee have been around for almost twice as long), so it is very impressive that they have managed to achieve the share they have in a market so crowded. Antivirus software companies are repeatedly in the public eye due to their popularity. It’s not uncommon for a product to have 100 million+ users in this space, so as you can imagine, slip ups in updates to algorithms are rather noticeable.

Here’s some of the top antivirus blunders we have seen from PC protection companies in the 30 year history of the software - Our first great antivirus blunder in the list was only very recently discovered; in December 2015, Dark Reading (a well respected news website in the computing security industry) reported that issues with memory allocation in computers ‘made it possible to compromise AVG, McAfee and Kaspersky products’. The threat is extremely dangerous as it basically turns the antivirus software into a tool the hacker can use to collect private information or causing system corruption, exactly the opposite of what an antivirus is supposed to do. To make it even worse, all it takes is an email to be sent and received by your computer: You don’t even have to open the email! An antivirus works by scanning every file your computer receives and sends, making sure that everything is safe for you and your computer. The exploit is made possible thanks to this mechanism.

The email comes with an attached file (specifically an ‘ASPack compression’ file), when the antivirus scans through it the file is unpacked, causing your computer to become infected. Without an antivirus, your computer would not be vulnerable to this exploit. The exploit can affect Windows PCs as well as Macs and Linux PCs, but don’t fear, a patch has been deployed to fix this issue. The next big mishap from a company in the PC protection industry worth mentioning was the fault of an unnamed brand, which had far less of a detrimental effect than it potentially could have done.

During the middle of a medical procedure involving the insertion of a long thin tube through the vein of a patient up to their heart, allowing the doctors to take readings of vital data (otherwise called a ‘cardiac catheterization’), the unnamable antivirus ran one of it’s regular scans which crashed the computer. The crash caused dangerous delays to the operation due to the patient having to be anaesthetized whilst the application was rebooted. Luckily, the operation was a complete success, but, as the FDA said, the mishap ‘could have results in harm to the patient’. Our last big blooper from an antivirus brand is the fault of Avira, one of the biggest names in the industry. Back in 2012, Avira released an update which blocked almost all legitimate applications on a user’s computer. The update quarantined almost every windows executable file (files of this type end in.exe), a mistake which one customer described as ‘catastrophic’ to his company.

As expected, a fix for the bug was released very quickly, but that doesn’t reduce the harm of making it impossible for over 100 million customers to open applications on their computer. Featured Articles The antivirus industry is always changing as companies update their products to better deal with current threats. Here’s some article to help keep you in the loop on all things AV.