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The AV-TEST Institute recently tested the most popular Windows 10 client antivirus products on three primary criteria: protection, performance, and usability. Products that ranked highest in all three areas were Kaspersky Lab Endpoint Security 10.3, Symantec Endpoint Protection 14.0 and Endpoint Protection Cloud 22.11, and Trend Micro Office Scan 12.
The downloadable infographic below summarizes the results, along with earlier test data for Windows 7 and Windows 8. You can drill down on the full results at The AV-TEST Institute's website.
download The best antivirus software for Windows client business usersThis infographic summarizes tests of Windows client antivirus software conducted by the AV-TEST Institute. AV-TEST InstituteWhy the best antivirus software may not be enough
Traditional signature-based antivirus is notoriously bad at stopping newer threats such as zero-day malware and ransomware, but it still has a place in the enterprise, experts say, as part of a multi-layer endpoint security protection strategy. The best antivirus products act as the first layer of defense, stopping the vast majority of malware attacks and leaving the broader endpoint protection software with a smaller load to deal with.
According to a survey of this year's Black Hat attendees, 73 percent think that traditional antivirus is irrelevant or obsolete. "The perception of the blocking or protection capabilities of antivirus has certainly declined," says Mike Spanbauer, vice president of strategy and research at NSS Labs, Inc.
Plenty of recent research supports that point of view. In December 2017, security company WatchGuard Technologies reported the results of a comprehensive test of traditional antivirus. They calculated how well a leading traditional antivirus product did at spotting zero-day threats by looking at customers who had both traditional antivirus and next-generation endpoint protection products installed. Traditional antivirus caught 9,861,318 malware variants, but it missed 3,074,534 others that were caught by a next-generation platform that used a behavior-based approach. That's a failure rate of about 24 percent.
The traditional antivirus product was from AVG Technologies, a well-reviewed product. In fact, in a report released in late 2017 by AV Comparatives, AVG caught 99.6 percent of the samples tested, making it one of the top ten products on the market.
Antivirus is particularly bad at catching ransomware, one of the biggest new threats that companies face. In a March...