Each year, Austrian based independent antivirus testing organization, AV-Comparatives, releases an annual report summarizing the results of all the tests it has conducted throughout the year.  Back in December of 2013, Emsisoft received an Advanced+ ranking from AV-C for our top performance  in their semi-annual Real World Protection Test.   You might not have known it, but we actually did quite well on a few other important AV-Cs throughout the year, and to commend our performance AV-Comparatives has given us a special mention in their 2013 Summary Report!

Consistent, Unobtrusive Performance on our Very First Try

Every year, AV-C pits software against software to determine which vendor is offering the very best anti-malware solution.  AV-C’s testing methods focus on determining which software can provide the best protection against real-world Internet threats, which can identify the most recent malicious programs among thousands of signatures, and which can provide the most comprehensive protection without slowing down the PC.  AV-C also runs optional tests to determine how well an anti-malware product  can remove malware from an infected computer, block new and unknown threats, and protect users from phishing attacks.

2013 was the very first year Emsisoft participated in any of AV-C’s tests.  We’d be lying if we said we weren’t intimidated by their comprehensiveness and their rigor, but looking back we’re quite proud of how we fared.  Even better, AV-C was impressed with our seminal performance as well:

“We feel that Emsisoft deserves a special mention for gaining the Silver Award in the Real-World Protection Test in its first year of testing.”

To us, this is quite the compliment — even if we didn’t quite make Gold.

Emsisoft’s 2013 AV-C Awards

Achieving AV-C’s Silver Award for Real World Protection in 2013 is the result of receiving top marks on both of the testing agency’s Real World Protection tests.  As mentioned above the most recent of these tests took place in December 2013, but there was actually another one that took place from March to June, the results of which were published in September.

AV-C’s Real World Protection Test measures anti-malware software under real world, dynamic conditions.  To do well, an anti-malware “must provide a high level of protection without producing too many false alarms, and without requiring the user to make many decisions.”  Anti-malware solutions that rank high in the Real World Protection test are those that demand little from their users and that operate unobtrusively in the background of their PC.  Each test is 3 months long, and after each round Emsisoft received an Advanced+ rating, the test’s highest mark.

In addition, Emsisoft also received an Advanced+ rating on AV-C’s File Detection Test in September, which evaluated how well our software could identity malicious files once they had been loaded onto a computer.  In all, this gave Emsisoft a 99.2% Protection Rate for the year.

AV-C Likes Our Take on PUPs, Too

Awards aside, AV-C also liked Emsisoft’s take on PUPs, commending it as a “well-illustrated” component of our software’s installation process.

If you haven’t heard, PUPs comprise an emerging (and quite annoying) segment of not-so-malware that come in on freeware installs and that you really don’t want bogging down your PC.  Many anti-malware companies are slow to mention PUPs, and so we couldn’t be happier to see that an independent testing organization like AV-C is recognizing them for what they are — and that they’ve got a sense of humor.  To learn more about PUPs, check out recent knowledge base blog post published last month.

AV-C Gold in 2014!

Overall, Emsisoft is proud to have placed as high as we did among 22 competitive vendors.  But we’re not stopping there.  2014 is here, and we’re ready to take on whatever AV-Comparatives can throw at us a second time around.  By this time next year, our goal is to achieve AV-C Gold, and to bring that 99.2 as close to 100% as possible, while remaining as unobtrusive as ever for the sake of our customers.

2013 was a year well done, but providing anti-malware is a job that never ends.  After a well spent holiday, Emsisoft is prepared for 2014 and ready to provide top ranking performance yet again!