The Best Home AV 2023-2024 (AV-Test + AV-Comparatives).

[Andy Ful]

This time, I counted top awards in Real-World tests (only the protection part).

In the period 2018-2019, Microsoft Defender was tested in AV-Comparatives with enabled SmartScreen and got top protection results. For a few years, it has been tested with disabled SmartScreen, so the results are lower. People who use it with enabled SmartScreen can still expect top protection at home.


More details:

 

[Bot]

That's great! Could you share with us which Home AV products won the most awards?

 

[Vitali Ortzi]

Advanced threat protection would be interesting too although it's true that it's less a home user threat

 

[badboy]

For a few years, it has been tested with disabled SmartScreen, so the results are lower.

But why it has been tested like this? Hmmm...

 

[Andy Ful]

I think that skipping SmartScreen is more interesting for AV Labs and AV vendors (including Microsoft). For users, the situation is more complex.

Microsoft did not decide to make SmartScreen an internal part of Defender. So testing Defender without SmartScreen is justified.
However, there is an interesting question. Should AV testing also include the Windows built-in default protection (Defender + SmartScreen + Edge)?
Almost all new computers are secured this way and many people use such protection without changing anything.

It is a problematic situation. Even an average third-party AV + SmartScreen could get very good scores in the Home AV tests, and the results of top AVs + SmartScreen would not be much better. Instead of Real-World AV tests, we would have SmartScreen tests and offline AV tests. But still, top AVs with disabled SmartScreen could shine in the false positives tests.

 

[badboy]

I think that skipping SmartScreen is more interesting for AV Labs and AV vendors (including Microsoft). For users, the situation is more complex.

Microsoft did not decide to make SmartScreen an internal part of Defender. So testing Defender without SmartScreen is justified.
However, there is an interesting question. Should AV testing also include the Windows built-in default protection (Defender + SmartScreen + Edge)?
Almost all new computers are secured this way and many people use such protection without changing anything.

It is a problematic situation. Even an average third-party AV + SmartScreen could get very good scores in the Home AV tests, and the results of top AVs + SmartScreen would not be much better. Instead of Real-World AV tests, we would have SmartScreen tests and offline AV tests. But still, top AVs with disabled SmartScreen could shine in the false positives tests.

That's why it's great that we have yours a separate product that runs all the software install through Smart Screen. I'm still hoping you'll put all the tools together and we not have to download them separately and customize them. Because now I am testing your SmartScreen, WHHLight, FirewallHardening, ConfigureDefender and Hard_Configureator. I'm still dreaming when all these products will be assembled into a single harvester with the ability to enable/disable individual functions.

 

[Andy Ful]

The most notable observation is a big improvement of Avast, Avira, and McAfee.
Avast improved CyberCapture, so it is now as effective at home as a file reputation lookup (Norton Download Insight or Windows SmartScreen). This improvement is still valid even for 0-hour malware, which is mainly untested. Furthermore, CyberCapture has a lower rate of false positives and does not depend on user interaction, so average users cannot make a mistake.
The success of Avira and McAfee is unclear to me. I am not sure if the protection improvements in Avira and McAfee are also valid for 0-hour malware.

 

[Moonhorse]

These tests are done during 2023-2024, but since then mcafee has new cloud based version wich is better than ever, f-secure stepped down and is avira clone since they ditched deepguard and norton became avast, much been happening lately. Not related to this topic but i had to say this

 

[Andy Ful]

These tests are done during 2023-2024, but since then mcafee has new cloud based version wich is better than ever, f-secure stepped down and is avira clone since they ditched deepguard and norton became avast, much been happening lately. Not related to this topic but i had to say this

Only a few months have passed since then. This is too little time to draw specific conclusions. I would rather wait the next two years.

 

[franz]

These tests are done during 2023-2024, but since then mcafee has new cloud based version wich is better than ever, f-secure stepped down and is avira clone since they ditched deepguard and norton became avast, much been happening lately. Not related to this topic but i had to say this

What do you mean by "they ditched Deepguard"? Deepguard is still present.

 

[Jonny Quest]

What do you mean by "they ditched Deepguard"? View attachment 287483Deepguard is still present.

Still present... for now? It is being renamed, or tweaked. It's a bit confusing.

[DeepGuard] TeamID in rules no longer work

Hi Dev team, With the newest release Version 19.8 (63381) I found that TeamID in rules are not working properly in strict mode.

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