A squared free - best antivirus for 2009

Recently I was having a spyware problem, and this time I decided to look around and retest some of my favourite antivirus software. I tried complex scanning with Dr.Web, Spyware Terminator, AntiMalware from MalwareBytes, Spybot and AdAware.

It appeared that none of them was able to detect the spyware/trojan I was having. I took this as a good sign but then Spyware Terminator Schield warned about some suspicious file trying to access the Internet. The filename was something random such as: 5fdsfgjik.dll and resided on c:\windows\system32\. That looked very suspicious to me, so I blocked the file. I also noticed that when left unblocked, my traffic lights were constantly on, so I located the file and send it to http://virusscan.jotti.org/. Only A-sqared, Icarus and one more software detected the virus. So I download the A-squared free version and cleaned up my computer. Later I found that the A squared took first place in testing executed by www.av-test.org test including 3200 of the most spread malwares with about 480,000 unique malware samples. Here are some details of the 2009 test:

http://www.protectstar-testlab.org/content/site/dateien/1010test-emsi-a-squared_en.pdf

http://www.emsisoft.com/images/antivirustest_pcsl_200907.png

http://malwareresearchgroup.com/?page_id=3

http://ssupdater.com/modules/Forums/index.php?showtopic=5508

2008 test: http://www.pcsecuritylabs.net/articles.php?article_id=4

The following programs were tested:

- Avira Antivir Personal Free Antivirus 9.0
- Bitdefender Free Edition 10
- Panda Cloud Antivirus Beta
- Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0
- Alwil Avast Antivirus Home 4.8
- AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.5
- Emsi Software a-squared Free 4.5
- Comodo Internet Security 3.10
- PC Tools Antivirus Free Edition 6.0
- Clamwin Free Antivirus 0.95

The detection test results for a-squared Free:

- Wildlist Malware on Demand: 100% detected
- Worms: 99.99% detected
- Backdoors: 99.98% detected
- Bots: 99.81% detected
- Trojans: 99.95% detected
- 5 active nasties: 100% detected
- Heuristic (1 week without updates): 63.56% detected
- Heuristic (2 weeks without updates): 52.72% detected
- Adware and Spyware: 99.57% detected

So go ahead and check your computer. It's free for the first 30days.

by Nevyan Neykov

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