How important is malware detection and blockage at start-up?

[nine9s]

Per AV-COmparatives latest performance test, Avast as well as many others do not protect at start-up:

"we test from sporadically in performance tests if the products are loading all their protection modules before e.g. malware in the start-up folder is executed. Several products failed this test, except AVG, Bitdefender, eScan, Kingsoft, Microsoft and Sophos. Those were the only products that detected and blocked the malware before its execution after system start-up"

http://www.av-comparatives.org/performance-tests/

Is this a concern or would it be very rare for malware to happen at start-up?

[DavidR]

I have no idea what they mean by no protection at startup, obviously avast is being started as soon as is possible in the boot and is already scanning way before the avast UI tray icon is in place.

[nine9s]

That testing group said all other tested AVs did not detect malware at startup except those mentioned.  I guess other things, including malware, load before the shields first come up at start-up.

[DavidR]

The problem is there is no detailed information on just what that is.

Personally I'm not overly concerned with that as the whole point of a resident AV is to prevent the infection in the first place, so assuming that you were clean when you shutdown it shouldn't be an issue on startup. But I still don't feel avast starts so late as not to be able to stop before execution.

The bigger problem really is if it wasn't detected in the first place for it to be able to run on startup, so if it wasn't before I don't see it getting detected later. And there is no mention if this/these malware samples are/were detected to start of with.

I have been using avast for nine years and not had a single infection.