Testing Free English Anti-Malware On Non-English Threats 78
An anonymous reader writes "Brazilian technology news site O Globo posted an interesting comparison on how free anti-malware behaves against non-English threats (Google translation of Portuguese original). By using a database of over 3000 samples from Brazil's Security Incident Contact Center, the numbers are quite different from all US anti-malware reviews. While Avira achieved the best score, 78%, Microsoft Security Essentials stopped less than 14%. This can be a headache for some large multinational corporations, whose IT departments deploy US anti-malware on the entire network, but have network segments outside US with many 'unknown' threats roaming around. I wonder what the results would be in other countries."
A few corrections (Score:5, Informative)
O Globo is one of the biggest newspapers on the country. But it is not a technology news site as the summary implies. Although yes, this was posted on the tech area of the site, it is hardly the focus of the newspaper.
Regarding the testing itself. This is just a report on a test made by an external firm (www. clavis.com.br) which was commissioned by the site. The test focused on the quality of free antivirus only. With implications that the issue lies in the fact that they are free, not that all antivirus are plagued by these issues (I will let you decide on what was the exactly aim of the article). Besides that, the test is devoid of crucial information. The database they used is a great one, the CAIS is maintained by our best scientific network, RNP (site in English: http://www.rnp.br/en/ [www.rnp.br]), so I trust the info there. But nowhere does it say that the threats are in Portuguese.
They used a list of 3.269 threats among virus, trojan horses, spywares, keyloggers, and etc. We don't know how many of each. Before the article they praise pay security suites, because they are a suite and not an antivirus only. There is no data on these threats, nor how many of each type, how old each one was, nor how they have threats which are not on the known list of each antivirus. Much less the language of the code.
Let me repeat it: NOTHING on the test implies that antivirus have a problem with non-English threats. It only said that those antivirus had that percentage of correct matches on either Heuristics or non-threads. But we don't know the exactly content of the database or the code used to test it. Much less the quality of the test.
Again: Language was not a part of the test!!!
Re:Jumping to conclusions (Score:5, Informative)