AV-Comparatives summary report 2013
Product of the year goes to Kaspersky Internet Security.
Top Rated products for 2013 are Bitdefender, ESET, F-Secure, Avast, BullGuard, Fortinet and AVIRA.
File Detection Winner(high detection rate of malware without causing too many false alarms): F-Secure (99.6%)
Additional F-Secure notes
Sophos, Avast, F-Secure, Kaspersky Lab and Bitdefender demonstrated a lower impact on system performance than other products.
When the real-time protection of F-Secure discovers malware on a flash drive, the alert shown is clear, reassuring, and does not require any user interaction; experts users can however see further details.
If protection components are disabled, F-Secure and Trend Micro supplement the rather fleeting warning from Windows Action Center with their own, much more obvious and persistent warnings.
Comments
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Some observations;
1. Although F-Secure did very well in the File-Detection category, this is not the best way to judge how well F-Secure protects users. The file-detection results are only relevant for mail and file servers. File-detection by itself is irrelevant for most consumers. Home users get infected through a browser, email attachments, USB sticks, network worms, P2P clients etc. They DON'T get infected by disabling their AV, copying millions of samples into some random folder and then scanning on-demand; the method used in av-comparatives file-detection tests.
The results which are the most relevant to your average user are those seen in the real-world tests, because they are judging protection when files are executed.
Overall, F-Secure is not top of the vendors but 99.2% blocked in the real-world protection tests for August-November suggests that Home users are well protected by F-Secure.
2. In the User-Interface Review Section of the report;
They did not like the User Interface but overall, F-Secure did very well in the 2013 tests. IMO, improvements can still be made in performance, banking protection and detection of PUPS/adware/spyware/riskware.
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Overall, I would recommend F-Secure to any average home computer user, which there are probably a lot more of than us geeky types who inhabit internet security forums.
In my opinion, Kaspersky is too complex and has too many options for the average user, and Bitdrfender is too far the other way, with too little in the way of configuration, and a poor alerts system. KIS also impacts significantly on the performance of each system I've seen it on, as does BD, to a lesser degree. Of the three, I think F-Secure offers the best balance of features and options, and has the least impact on system resources. There are some things I would change, such as bringing back fully independant parental controls, and I would certainly make DeepGuard more user configurable, but other than that, I think it's pretty good.
