avast! earned ADVANCED rating in AV-Comparatives test.

[galooma]

And things should improve quite substantially in avast 5...  Vlk

Again with the tease , another crumb please 

[MWassef]

congrats to us 

[BJ_GeOrgE]

grats to alwil team which proves for once again that avast is competitive and can reach kaspersky and eset and even become better than them  alwil keep up the gd work..and its indeed a gd idea to post the results in the webpage..it would be a nice way to advertise avast as u show y they should trust it..

[Dwarden]

keep the progress ... or ideally speed it up even more 

[gdiloren]

I don't know if I get it... To hit 81% detection you have to have a high false-positive rate???

[IBK]

no.

[RejZoR]

NOD32 prowes that but you certanly tolerate more FPs easily if AV justifies them with extreme detection rate of actual malware (opposed to AV with awful detection and lots of false positives).

[galooma]

@Andreas
                Can you elaborate a little on how Avira`s score deteriorated from what looked great to standard rating

[IBK]

its due false positives.
getting high scores (also in the tests of august) with a noisy heuristic is easy. as FP's are not something tolerable (and passing our FP test "should" be easy) it does not deserve the A+ or A rating.
e.g. in virusbulletin tests only 1 FP is needed to do not get any award.

[RejZoR]

This just means heuristics are indeed strong, but not fine tuned enough. NOD32 is a live proof of that, they offer excellent heuristics with very low false positive rates (if we look globally, not just this test). Thats why avast! scored that well too. They have detection and false positives nicely balanced.

[Staind]

But, the thing is if you look at the rate of improvement for AVIRA, when its detection rate was something like 41% it received Advanced++ standing, so it increased its number of false positives from about 6 to 16 but its detection increased from 41% to 81% and now its just standard.  The AV comparative seems very made up.

[IBK]

A++ does not exist. A+ is the highest. FP's are sent to the vendors after the tests, so if FP's still raise in our FP tests it means that a product has a very noisy heuristic / weak signatures and this makes it easy to get high scores when scanning malware. to get A+ it is only needed to reach 40% and have only few FP's. the categorization is unchanged since years; changing the rating system to make avira look better is unfair. FP's are an issue and should not be talked down.

[bob3160]

Statistics:
Depending on how they are put together, can make 1+1=3
The best way to judge a product is by how it performs for you on your system. 

[RejZoR]

Well, i totally agree with IBK and his rules. Most of AVs even show they can work just fine with those rules (NOD32 and KAV7 specifically, you can also include avast! in there). Avira has to iron out false positives in their heuristics engine. As simple as that.

[Lisandro]

Aggressive heuristic could sell an image that the product is detecting MORE than the others. It could be used as an advertisement. I agree with IBK and RejZor. Also with Bob, as no product will be perfect and we do like layered defense