NSS Labs Endpoint Protection Test Results

On Monday, NSS Labs released the results of their anti-malware Endpoint Protection Product tests. The test results are separated into consumer and corporate product lines, with the consumer report available for download from their web site after free registration. The test put each product through a 17-day rolling assessment, where each day the latest updates to the product were applied and a fresh list of malware-serving URLs were processed. This provides a clear view of how these products fare in the real world, and not just against a static list of well-known samples. Each product had two opportunities to block the malware, once during download, and again once it was written to disk and executed by the user. The score for a given product is calculated as the sum of both methods of blocking the sample, for example, if it was missed during download, but caught on execution, it still counts as being blocked. Each of these products also contains an anti-virus engine, which should provide some basic protection for unknown samples, based on heuristics and behavior.The top-ranking product in the consumer test was Trend Micro, which caught a whopping 96.4% of all malware samples, followed by Kaspersky at 87.8%. Most of the major-brand consumer products had an average closer to 80%, with AVG, Panda, and ESET all coming (continue reading...)