The latest tests, conducted by Virus Bulletin over 32 antivirus technologies, revealed that 17 products, including Trend Micro, Kaspersky, Norman and Sophos, failed to protect Windows 2000, "The Register" reported today. The research was supposed to give the antiviruses the VB100 certification after they being tested
by the experts, in order to find out if they managed to discover the most popular malware without returning any false alarm. According to the same source, 13 products had problems in detection of malware, while others gave fake alarms over clean files.

"Polymorphic malware went out of fashion for some time but has recently become popular with malware writers once more, both in self-morphing viruses and in Trojans morphed at the server side before delivery," John Hawes of Virus Bulletin said, according to "The Register".

"It was a shock and a concern to see such a poor performance from so many products in this latest round of testing. It is particularly disappointing to see so many major products missing significant real-world threats. In these days of hourly updates computer users really ought to be able to rely on their chosen security vendors for full protection against known threats", he added.

Kaspersky and Sophos represent two of the best antivirus technologies on the market, their products being installed on millions of computers all over the world. In fact, even the recent tests conducted by the experts have revealed that Kaspersky and Sophos are the best solutions when it comes to unknown malware.

According to the results provided by AVIEWS, Sophos took the first place with an impressive 80 percent detection rate, which means that this antivirus managed to detect almost all the unknown malware files. Kaspersky came on the second place with 65 percent, while other top players, such as Symantec and Microsoft, recorded only 35 percent and 50 percent.

-softpedia