“Advanced+” for Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012 in AV-Comparatives’ On-Demand Malware Test

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Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content and threat management solutions, announces that its product Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012 has been awarded the “Advanced+” grade – the highest possible – in On-Demand testing for malicious software detection and false alarms conducted by respected independent anti-virus testing laboratory AV-Comparatives.

The on-demand testing – a classic AV evaluation method – was conducted on 20 well-known, up-to-date anti-virus products of different manufacturers in August 2012, and the final results were published on September 27. Approximately 200,000 recent, prevalent malware samples were used in the testing, and Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012 successfully detected 98.3% of them; some of the other products tested detected around just 85%; the average score was 96.2%.

The 20 AV products were also tested for the number of false positives they showed up - that is, how many out of hundreds of thousands of clean files were falsely indicated as malicious. Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012 returned just one false positive, which is another superb result - especially when one considers that the highest grade in this test is named “Few” [false positives] and a product can achieve this best-of-the-breed status with even as many as 15 false positives. Some other tested products in the testing gave results in the 50s - firmly in the “Many” category. Besides, it should be noted that the single false positive that Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012 did show up is hardly ever found in real-world situations. Nevertheless, it was immediately fixed.

Nikita Shvetsov, Director of Anti-Malware Research of Kaspersky Lab, said: “We are glad to see that AV-Comparatives is working on increasing the quality of the test collection, and we think that the 200 000 files used in the latest test represent accurately the situation with real-life prevalent malware today. However, an On-Demand test doesn’t show up all the capabilities of a product, since it only tests a limited number of AV technologies. Therefore, for a full-fledged comparison, we would recommend also looking up Whole Product Dynamic tests and Proactive tests, which are also regularly conducted by AV-Comparatives and other reputable testing labs.”

More detailed information on the results of the testing can be found at:
http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/fp/avc_fp_aug2011.pdf