Whats The Cheapest Antivirus Protection

Whats The Cheapest Antivirus Protection – Neil J. Rubenking Neil J. Rubenking Senior Security Analyst My Experience I was the president of the San Francisco PC Users Group for three years when the IBM PC first came out. That’s how I met the editorial team that brought me to the team in 1986. In the years since that fateful meeting, I’ve become an expert on security, privacy, and privacy, implementing antivirus tools, security suites, and everything else. Various security software go through their steps. read full biography

AVG AntiVirus Free offers the exact same great antivirus engine as Avast Free Antivirus, plus other useful features.

Whats The Cheapest Antivirus Protection

Editors independently select and review products. If you buy through an affiliate link, we may earn a commission to help support our testing.

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Everyone needs antivirus protection. Microsoft agrees: If Windows doesn’t detect third-party antivirus software, it will insist on turning on its own Windows Defender. But you can get better protection than built-in protection without spending extra money. AVG AntiVirus Free has millions of users worldwide. It received excellent scores in our own tests and those of independent labs.

Avast acquired AVG in 2016. The two product lines continue to exist separately, but the basic antivirus protection mechanisms are the same, as evidenced by our tests and the results of independent lab tests. Why would the company keep both of them? AVG and Avast Free Antivirus have huge followings, but globally, each excels in a different field. The combined company operates globally.

That global reach got AVG’s attention, but it didn’t pay for it. AVG only makes money when customers pay for premium security packages. When you install free antivirus software, you’ll need to upgrade it or at least start a 30-day free trial to try out all the premium features. Other products, including Avira Free Security, require you to upgrade more seriously.

Since 1982, we’ve tested and evaluated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. See how we tested. (opens in new window)

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However, the professional version of AVG Antivirus is no longer available. If you click on a professional feature in the free antivirus, it will prompt you to upgrade to the full AVG Internet Security package.

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The product’s user interface has green and white text on a slate gray background. It clearly differentiates between free and premium features. It also marks the panels used to protect your computer, Internet and email as basic protection. Complete protection includes panels for hacker protection, privacy and payment protection. All three display a padlock icon; clicking them will take you to the AVG Security Pack.

You may not realize it, but in most cases, antivirus companies pay for the privilege of testing their products at independent labs. The company really wins; the high score gives it bragging rights, and if the score is low, the lab helps the company fix its problems. With free antivirus software that doesn’t generate any revenue, companies might want to avoid spending on testing. Not AVG, it’s his credit. We monitor four independent testing laboratories, which regularly issue reports of their results. Three of them included AVG in their latest reports, and all four included its cousin Avast.

Analysts at AV-Comparatives(opens in a new window) conduct various security tests, four of which we track. Products meeting the required minimum score are rated “Standard,” while those exhibiting advanced features and functionality may be rated “Premium” or “Premium+.”

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AVG and Avast received Advanced+ scores in all three tests. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, ESET, G Data and Kaspersky scored Advanced+ scores in all three tests.

The AV-Test Institute(opens in a new window) reports on how antivirus software functions in three dimensions: protection, performance, and usability. There are six possible points for each category, with a maximum of 18 points. AVG scored a 6 for usability, meaning it didn’t flag misbehaving programs or websites as malware, and a 6 for malware protection. It came close, with a score of 5.5. Avast fits those numbers perfectly.

A score of just 17.5 was enough for AV-Test to award AVG and Avast the top products. Kaspersky Security Cloud Free also scored 17.5 points. Note, however, that in the last test, 10 products scored 18.

To be as realistic as possible, SE Labs experts (opens in new window) captured disk downloads and other web attacks using a replay system to attack each test product with the exact same attack. The best products are AAA certified; others may be certification at AA, A, B, or C levels. Like Avast, AVG is already AAA certified.

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Quite a few other products earned AAA certification in SE Labs’ latest tests. These include Avira, Microsoft Windows Defender Security Center, and Norton.

MRG-Effitas (opens in a new window) reports slightly different test results than other labs. Products that don’t provide perfect or near-perfect protection simply fail. We follow two tests in this lab. Avast appears in one of the latest reports, while the other does not include Avast or AVG. Alas, despite past successes, Avast failed the latest test.

A third of the current products I track don’t show up on any lab results, and another quarter have only one lab result. After testing in three labs, AVG is almost at the elite level. His cumulative lab score of 9.9 out of 10 is impressive. With four tests, Avast had better coverage, but had a lower cumulative score of 9.6 because it failed the additional test. The big winner was Kaspersky, with 9.9 results from all four labs.

Any malware from the Internet has to go through a lot of defense before it can infect your computer. For example, AVG may block any access to malware-hosting URLs or destroy malware payloads before the download is complete. I’ll discuss these levels of malware protection shortly.

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If the file already exists on your computer, AVG assumes that it must have passed an earlier protection level. Like Avast, Emsisoft Anti-Malware, McAfee, and some others, its real-time protection doesn’t scan such files on simple access. Instead, it performs a final scan of these files before executing them.

To test AVG’s ability to block malware, I opened the folder containing my current collection of malware samples and tried running each one. AVG blocked over 90% of files immediately after launching, killing them so quickly that Windows displayed an error message stating that the file could not be found. This eliminates most issues with being able to boot before a full install. Meanwhile, I tested Avast and got the exact same results.

Both products detected 96 percent of samples and scored 9.6 out of 10, a tenth better than Norton AntiVirus Plus. When tested against the same set of malware, Sophos and G Data scored 9.7 and 9.8, respectively. Topping the list was Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus, which scored a perfect 10.

When AVG detects a completely unfamiliar file, it blocks the file from running and sends it to AVG headquarters for analysis. AVG displays a message that a suspicious file has been found and promises to evaluate it within seconds. All of my hand-coded test utilities produced this warning; everyone got clean sanitation correctly. On the other hand, a ransomware sample flagged as suspicious was eventually quarantined. Avast provides the exact same protection for unknown and suspicious files.

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The samples we use to test malware blocking remain unchanged for several months. To test each product’s ability to handle the latest malware, we started with a set of malware-hosting URLs provided by MRG-Effitas. We try to run through each URL, catching whether antivirus software is blocking access to the URL, quarantining malware downloads, or skipping the boat entirely.

We are testing with URLs from the last few days until we have a large enough sample set. Then we wrap up. AVG blocked access to 65% of URLs and removed another 29% during the download phase, resulting in 94% protection; Avast showed the same results. That’s not bad, but some competitors do it better. McAfee AntiVirus Plus provides 100% protection. Bitdefender, Sophos, and G Data performed 99 percent of the time in this test.

Phishing sites don’t require fancy coding skills to infect visitors with malware. Instead of trying to bypass the protections of the operating system and antivirus software, they force users to reveal their secrets. Scammers simply create a convincing fake confidential website (perhaps a bank or PayPal) and then link to this fake website.