“What is the best antivirus product on the market?”  I am being asked very often by friends and even people who I met for the first time. The answer I give is never “Product X”, because there is no such thing as “the best” when it comes to antimalware products.

It is always about the security needs of the person or company who asks the question. These security needs are in the end dependent on the attack vectors against each individual.
For example, if we try to protect a standard home user or a micro-small company, we need to think at On Access (including ransomware detection) and On Demand scanning, web filtering, ad filtering and a certain degree of privacy protection. For a small company, we need to think more at things like email filtering (spam and phishing), targeted attacks, backup, disaster recovery, remote management and so on.

In my opinion, the most important asset of an antimalware product is the combination of the two Ps: Protection-Performance.

Why? In general, the more features a product has, the better the protection it offers is. However, this comes always with the cost of reducing the computer’s performance. So, a good antimalware product has to offer a good balance between protection and performance.

CORE Antivirus entered the Virus Bulletin regular testing in June 2020 and successfully earned VB100% since then.

CORE Antivirus comes with the combination of features mostly required by home users, just as mentioned above. The Virus Bulletin testing is measuring the detection rate, the false positive rate

A product achieves a VB100 certification if:

• No more than 0.5% of WildList samples are missed

and

• No more than 0.01% of legitimate files are blocked

For full details, we refer to the VB100 methodology on the Virus Bulletin website: https://www.virusbulletin.com/testing/vb100/vb100-methodology/vb100-methodology-ver1-1/. This test used version 1.1 of the VB100 methodology.

The malware part of the VB100 certification uses the WildList, a regularly updated list of extremely well-vetted malware samples, guaranteed to have been spotted in the wild multiple times. This makes them very suitable for a certification test like VB100.

The ‘Diversity Test’ looks at products’ detection of another set of recent malware samples, to acknowledge the fact that products detect malware samples beyond a standard set of samples, and provides a measure of that detection.