Topic: Test: Malware Protection for Androide - March 2012

[Pez]

Test: Malware Protection for Androide - March 2012

Introduction

Over the past year, the popularity of the Android system has led to a huge increase in the distribution of Android malware (see fig. 1). This malware is mainly distributed in markets operated by third parties, but even the Google Android Market cannot guarantee that all of its listed applications do not contain any threats. Users should no longer blindly trust all apps. A large range of protection programmes that can help to identify dangerous apps and remove them from a user's device are now available.
 
AV-TEST has inspected 41 different virus scanners for Android with regard to their detection performance. About half of these scanners are not yet suitable for use as reliable products and identify less than 65% of the 618 types of malware tested. The mobile versions of well-known desktop products were mostly evaluated as good or very good. Figure 2 shows how the products cover all detection areas.

You can find the detailed test report here.  

Update: March 15th, 2012 (version 1.1a): It has been brought to our attention that some parties consider certain aspects of our initial test report to be imprecise or flawed. AV-TEST has therefore now performed additional tests to clear up these issues. This report contains the updated results from these additional tests, which were carried out between March 9th and 13th on the most recent program versions and signature updates of all products that were initially not placed in the light green or dark green category.
 

Picture 1                                                            Picture 2

Summary

The best products in our tests (with detection rates of 90% and above) come from the following top 10 companies, listed in alphabetic order: Avast, Dr. Web, F-Secure, Ikarus, Kaspersky, Lookout, McAfee, MYAndroid Protection/MYMobile Security, NQ Mobile/NetQin and Zoner. Users of products made by these companies can be assured that they are protected against malware.
 
Products with a detection rate of between 65% and 90% can also be considered to be very good and have the potential to join the group of best products above if small changes are made to the set of malware tested. Some of these products only fail to detect just one or two malware families that may not even be prevalent in certain environments. The following 13 products, listed in alphabetic order, fall into this category: AegisLab, AVG Mobilation, Bitdefender, BullGuard, Comodo, ESET, Norton/Symantec, QuickHeal, Super Security, Total Defense, Trend Micro, Vipre/GFI and Webroot
 
It should be noted that Bitdefender, ESET, Trend Micro and Vipre missed the top category by just a few samples. The average family detection rate for these four products was in the area of 88.1% to 89.9%.
 
BluePoint, G Data and Kinetoo fall into the third category, namely that of products with a detection rate of between 40% and 65%. It is possible that the manufacturers of these products do not yet have a sufficient infrastructure that enables them to collect a wide range of malware or that they focus on a local market. These products provide reliable malware protection against a few families, but have trouble dealing with and detecting others. It can be expected that these products will improve when their manufacturers focus on a wider variety of malware samples.
 
The fourth category, which is used for products with a detection rate of less than 40%, does not contain any products from well-known anti-virus protection manufacturers. Some of the products in this category also performed below average in our last test. We have now reviewed two other products that are listed in this final category and we could not clearly determine whether or not they correctly scanned the set of malware test or whether they were actually able to detect anything at all. We were therefore unable to record a detection rate when using our set of well-known samples or the EICAR test file.

You can find the detailed test report here.

Report at AV-TEST.org.


Android Malware Retest Puts McAfee Mobile Security at Top of Class

On March 6, the widely recognized institute AV-TEST published a long awaited review of Malware Protection for Android–with really disappointing results for us  And the report was widely quoted in the media.

An analysis on our side quickly showed that an outdated version of McAfee Mobile Security had been tested. Yesterday AV-TEST announced that they had run a retest and they released an update of the results. This time, the current version of McAfee Mobile Security (2.0.1.366) and the new results reflect where we (and you) expect us to be: At the top.

In the test the top 10 products are rated with a >90 percent detection rate. A more detailed report of malware family detection shows we were one of just three products with flawless detection through all malware families. You can read all about the test and download the full report at AV-TEST.org.

We are happy that the confusion could be cleared up. If you ever needed a compelling reason to update to the latest version, then this test is one.


Orginal article: Monday, March 19, 2012 at 9:55am by Toralv Dirro

[Samker]

FYI, here is ("older") interesting discussion about mentioned study from AV-Test: http://scforum.info/index.php/topic,100.msg18495.html#msg18495

[Pez]

Note also that this is a TEST of the Androide AntiVirus version.
Not the total product line with the Computer AntiVirus protection that is what I understand in discussion at the:
http://scforum.info/index.php/topic,100.msg18495.html#msg18495