Will the air bags in your car protect you in a crash? You could drive the car into a bridge abutment to find out, but you probably won't. Instead, you rely on the NHTSA to run crash tests and ensure that car makers are installing the air bags correctly. In the same way, you really don't want to test your
antivirus by subjecting it to active malware. Leave that sort of testing to the independent labs around the world; they know what they're doing! Microsoft's free antivirus has been a perpetual sad sack in these lab tests, but recent reports suggest that may be changing.
Located in Magdeburg, Germany,
AV-Test Institute is a well-respected lab. The institute takes advantage of its proximity to such scientific organizations as the Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation IFF, the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems, and the Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg. With this last institution in particular, AV-Test supervises scientific final-year theses and offers course-related internships.
Threefold Evaluation
The researchers at AV-Test realize that there's more to antivirus than detecting and eliminating malware. An effective antivirus also must refrain from erroneously identifying valid programs or websites as malicious. And of course, it can't slow system performance by hogging resources. To address these criteria, they rate each antivirus on protection against malware, low impact on performance, and usability, meaning few or no false positives.
