Bitdefender Security Suite Earns Top Endurance Rating

Based in Magdeburg, Germany, AV-Test is an innovative lab that puts security products through a variety of tests. Over the past six months they've had 45 computers running day and night, testing two dozen significant security suites under Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8. Each product was challenged to protect against 400 brand-new zero-day threats and against a reference set containing about 60,000 known malware samples. The overall report also rates each product's usability and impact on system performance. All three Windows versions used for testing come with firewall and antivirus protection built in. Researchers also tested these combinations, using their results as a baseline.
Well-Known Winners
Of the 24 products tested under all three Windows versions, Bitdefender$49.95 at BitDefender is a clear winner. It detected 100 percent of the real-world zero-day samples and 100 percent of the reference set. F-Secure and Kaspersky$33.43 at Discount Mountain also achieved perfect scores in these tests. G-Data and Symantec came very close, with 100 percent detection of the reference set and 99 percent of the zero-day samples.
In addition, Bitdefender earned the top score in the complete endurance test. A product can earn up to six points each for protection, performance, and usability, so the highest possible score is 18 points. Bitdefender scored an impressive 17.2, a full point higher than the nearest competitor. Kaspersky earned 16.0 points; Symantec$25.98 at Discount Mountain came in third with 15.5.
Avast!, F-Secure, and G Data shared fourth place, each with 15.2 points. That makes avast! the highest-scoring free solution. As for Windows's built-in protection, it scored 10.8 points, detected 97 percent of the reference set, and caught just 79 percent of the real-world samples.
Useful Conclusions
The full report, available on the AV-Test website, draws some interesting conclusions from this endurance test. The test shows very clearly that you get a lot more protection from a good (or even mediocre) third-party security solution than from what's built into Windows. The report concludes that "use of external security solutions can lead to a massive improvement when it comes to system protection."
On the flip side, you will probably pay a price in decreased system performance due to the resources consumed by you security product. The report notes that the average performance score for the top ten products overall was just 4.0 of 6.0 possible points. Bitdefender's score of 5.2 is impressive. Webroot managed 6.0 points for performance; lower scores in protection and usability dragged down its total.
As for free protection, avast! and AVG both made it into the top ten for overall endurance score, but they weren't at the top for protection. Even so, both managed 99 percent detection of the reference set. Avast detected 98 percent of the real-world samples; AVG caught 97 percent. Those are good scores, but the best products earned 100 percent in both tests.
Independent labs like AV-Test are immensely helpful both to consumers and to reviewers like myself. There's no way I could run tests on 45 computers day and night for six months straight! When you're looking to choose a new antivirus or security suite, you'll definitely want to see what the labs have to say.