Which antivirus program is best? By Scott Brown, Information Security Analyst, Colby-Sawyer College.

For many years, I read testing results from industry standard antivirus testing companies and I tried to make heads or tails of it. When I finished, I still pondered the question that brought me to read them in the first place. What antivirus program was best for my school?

Working as an Information Security Analyst at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, New Hampshire, I have the opportunity to see all sorts of malware.

I chose to test these threats with 13 of the most popular antivirus programs available in the US, because I have seen these specific threats destroy a computer and render it useless both on and off the internet. These threats are not self-propagating, which is what a true virus is.

Propagation is unnecessary when many of these infections are packaged with popular games or peer-to peer programs or on a webpage that gets 10,000 hits a day. In fact, Kazaa was the number one searched word on Yahoo last year. In any case, most of these infections were far more complicated and time consuming to remove and had worse effects than even the dreaded Sasser worm.

In one case, I experienced a computer with over 300 processes running; it took more than 20 minutes to get the task manager up. In the information security age, antivirus programs that do not detect these spyware/virus crossbreeds simply won't cut it. Users need a complete antivirus solution combined with a good spyware solution with real-time protection such as Pest Patrol or Spy Sweeper. Older programs tend not to address Trojans for spyware. Pest Patrol reports over 1000 new pests every month. ESET found more than 400 new virus or Trojans in the week of testing, while some of the traditional antivirus companies found as few as nine infections.

The tests
A few notes about my testing. I reviewed 13 different antivirus programs, testing them on a fully patched Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2 virtual machine (VMware) with the latest version and definitions from the antivirus company's website. Only products assumed by me to be available to consumers in the US (or at least I thought they were, previous to testing) were tested. I did not read any manuals. Like most of you, I want to install my antivirus product, know that I am immediately protected and continue on with my chosen activity.

Products were all tested on the same day and then exactly one week later.

To test the antivirus companies for their responsiveness, each company was sent the 10 zero-day viruses and two exploits that they had been previously unaware of, e-mailed to them that same day using a distribution list. Exactly one week later, I updated all antivirus definitions and retested. Note that some of these viruses were detected by many of the antivirus companies as unknown infections with the use of heuristics (refer to the "viruses detected before submission" and "viruses detected one week after submission with updated definitions" charts in the full paper online at www.cxoamerica.com).

Please remember that the recommendations in this report are only my opinion, developed as a result of my testing.

After an extensive internal test of nearly every antivirus product on the market for higher education, I concluded that NOD32 is the best antivirus product on the market. Kaspersky is my second choice.

Both are top notch. In the testing, NOD32 excelled in speed and low use of resources, while Kaspersky did a better job with archives, but detected fewer overall. It is worth noting that NOD32 has US support. A real person answers the phone and the company offers close to 24/7 e-mail support. Only recently, has Kaspersky had an office in the US. bit defender and Panda were next in line. However, Panda was one of the most resource-intensive products tested. All four of these products deal with downloader Trojans, droppers and a wide variety of malware and would be helpful in this fast-growing epidemic.

College students are becoming increasingly technologically savvy, spending a significant amount of time daily exploring the internet, reading and sending e-mail and downloading potentially risky files. Starting with the fall 2005 semester, Colby-Sawyer College will require all computers that plug into a campus network connection to have NOD32 antivirus protection.

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