An interesting study by a third-party security company regarding anti-virus suites regarding their performance has recently been issued. After pitting 32 different products against each other, all up against the same plethora of malware and viruses, Virus Bulletin discovered that an alarming number of them failed to meet their expectations. While some failed for reasons you might just as soon shrug off, like false positives, others, many well known, failed to detect large number of viruses that have been known about for some time.
Using the WildList as their dataset, Virus Bulletin discovered that 17 of the 32 failed, including some very popular suites from vendors like Trend Micro. Some of them were disturbingly bad, such as CA Home, which had 40 misses. You can read more about the benchmarks they use as well as the most recent study at their site
How much do you trust your anti-virus suite? And moreover, do you believe that pay products versus free products in the anti-virus world have more robustness? It seems that is not always the case.