“All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others”

Which is of course a classic quote from Animal Farm by George Orwell and one that I quite like it as it can be used to describe so many human interactions particularly those pertaining to politicians which, of course, was the whole purpose of the book in the first place.

It can also be applied to anti-virus packages along with another saying “You get what you pay for”.

As I have mentioned in this column before we use ESET as it consistently outperforms the opposition in independent tests. The two organisations that test these packages are AV Comparatives and Virus Bulletin. Both these organisations have released their latest results and the results are quite interesting.

First, let’s just say that one set of results shouldn’t be used as the definitive guide but should instead be taken in the context of the previous results as well.

First, let’s take the Virus Bulletin results, of those anti-virus packages entered into all categories (4 versions of Windows and Linux) only Alwil, Eset, F-secure and Kaspersky passed each test. Both Symantec (Norton) and McAfee failed on one category. AVG was only entered into the four windows categories and passed all of them as did CA Business edition. The only package to pass these categories over 54 times is ESET which is the most consistent package.

In the AV Comparatives tested for new virus detection, that is a virus that isn’t yet known. Alwil, ESET, Bitdefender, Microworld, F-Secure, G-Data, Kaspersky and Microsoft managed to attain the Advanced+ rating with McAfee and Symantec only achieving Advanced and Standard respectively.

Again, Eset consistently performs well in the AV-Comparatives tests.

So, while AV packages may be equal some are most definitely more equal than others.

The folks at Virus Bulletin are also starting to test spam filters and some interesting results have been found. When spam filters are used in conjunction with each other (Virus Bulletin used 14) and if more than five detected an email as being spam then over 99.8% of spam was detected. More interestingly there were zero false positives. So, what the anti-spam developers should do is produce a product together and sell it as a service for filtering email. I for one would sign up