Proactive Test by AV-Comparatives

[Silk0]

The proactive test has been released... and the results are not good for Avast! 

http://www.av-comparatives.org/comparativesreviews/retrospective-test

[Vlk]

A detection rate of 43% (with 3-month old definitions) is a decent score for us, actually much better than the last time (when it was 29%).

Anyway, I was never a big fan of testing of AV products with outdated signatures. I believe there are much more accurate ways to assess a product's pro-activeness...

Thanks
Vlk

[Silk0]

Yeah... a improvement of 14% is actually quite good...
And Avast! it's only 7% away from Advanced + rank... 

[BRANDONN2008]

43% is okay, but it was the second lowest of all the products tested.

[DavidR]

Yes but as Vlk said it doesn't really mimic real life use by users, they don't let their virus definitions get to be 3 months old, they are auto update and avast has a whinge if they are out of date.

So there isn't a really good way of testing real life pro-active defence.

[Maxx_original]

heh, try to achieve higher score when you're a mostly used AV and almost each malware author precisely tests his creations against you... why would someone write "new" well detected malware when there's a room for writing undetected malware (and the room will always be there)? we're significantly better in this round (compared to previous one) and we still don't tend to be overparanoid (we don't use massive blacklisting of packers like others do)..

[RejZoR]

Plus this test doesn't take Network Shield into account which in real world conditions proctively blocks loads of malware. And when Behavior Shield will be fully operational (probably sometime next year), the score will go higher as well. However this test will not take it into account either (just like it doesn't Network Shield now).

[Hexo]

If the Behavior Shield will work on 64bit systems, then i can change all my machines to avast ^^

[gentle4ug]

With the "Best" still missing 40%, thats why I never (intentially) store any sensitive data on my computer.  Run IE8 in "porn" mode when performing any potenially sensitive transactions, and am looking at sanboxing to always start browsing with a clean slate.

Be careful out there.

[YoKenny]

If the Behavior Shield will work on 64bit systems, then i can change all my machines to avast ^^

Its working now with the latest beta.