Panda antivirus software has been given a top award by the German testing laboratory AV-Test.org.

The award was given in the Q2 Product Review and Certification Report and a product from Panda antivirus software, the Panda Internet 2010 Security Solution, grabbed top spot. Its score in the protection test, and the cleaning and repairing infected computers test, was an impressive 5.5 out of 6. For usability, it scored a high 5 out of 6.

The product detected all of the ‘in the wild’ pieces of malware, as well as 100 per cent of the other malware infections it was bombarded with in the test. These are both essential for a product to give vital protection to the user against the kinds of dangers that circulate continuously.

Panda Security managed to detect 82, 89 and 74 per cent of zero-day malware attacks from the internet including e-mail. 81 per cent of the samples used were detected in the dynamic detection test; this stands much higher than the industry average of 63 per cent.
Identifying and dealing with rootkits was another area where the Panda Internet Security 2010 did well, scoring 100 per cent for this and other kinds of hidden malware detection.

Panda’s Collective Intelligence technology is believed to be the reasons for such high scores; this technology can detect known or unknown malware, and then send them to the cloud to be checked and then, if necessary, eliminated.

The reasons behind Panda’s 5 out of 6 score in usability are clear: the industry uses an average of 251 seconds as a guide for the impact of the product on a computer; Panda Internet Security 2010’s performance was 101 seconds, less than half of this average.

Pedro Bustamante, senior research advisor at Panda Security, "These results illustrate the incredible capability of Panda’s Collective Intelligence detection system. More significantly, this detection power has no impact on users’ computers, since the scanning and the classification of malware takes place entirely in the cloud.

Andreas Marx, CEO of AV-Test.org, describes the demands AV-Test.org have for the products they test: “At AV-Test.org, we have tested all products with all update functionality and ‘in the cloud’ protection enabled, so no product updates were frozen.

This way, the products had to demonstrate their real world capabilities using all components and protection layers in realistic test scenarios."

Panda Antivirus software has come out on top throughout all tests that were thrown at it by AV-Test.org, suggesting a strong capability in keeping user’s computers safe, and justifying its leading position in the Q2 Product Review and Certification Report.

Guest Article by Neil Camp