It has been announced that Virus Bulletin tests have just been completed on its largest number of anti-malware products yet.

Virus Bulletin tests were run in April 2010 on 60 products and 20 were failed, including those from Microsoft, Norman, Frisk and FortiNet whose products put up for examination failed to make the acceptable grade.

The Virus Bulletin tests threw-in a number of wobblies, including how well the products detected complex polymorphic viruses and also, some products produced false alarms on clean files. Some of these failing this test were products from major companies, with Adobe, Google, Microsoft and Sun in the firing line.

Some 40 products did pass the Virus Bulletin tests though and were awarded the VB100 certification.

The Virus Bulletin tests’ Anti-malware Test Director John Hawes said: “We put a huge range of products through their paces this month, and saw the usual problems with detection of complex viruses and false alarms on common software, with some splendid performances from some and pretty dire showings from others.

“It was pretty shocking how many crashes, freezes, hangs and errors we encountered in this test. XP has been around for a long, long time now and is still the world’s most widely used computing environment – so developers should be producing rock-solid software for it time after time. I’m sure any user who sees their system brought to a halt by their security software will vote with their feet and take their custom elsewhere.”

The Virus Bulletin tests have been going for about ten years and a detailed breakdown of the results are available to subscribers of the service. Virus Bulletin take various computer security products and subject them to a series of stringent tests against a range of malware which are on the WildList. This list is made up of the most up-to-date malware programmes known to be worrying the world’s computers. The Virus Bulletin tests involve making sure that the products under review have to be able to 100%  detect malware on the WildList. They also must not generate any false alarms when inspecting a clean set of files.

This process makes the Virus Bulletin tests and their VB100 Certification Scheme an important product accolade in the industry and consumer sector.

Guest Article by Neil Camp