AV Test’s October 2017 suprise ranking

German independent IT security institute AV Test released its Windows home user antivirus ranking for October 2017 recently.

The institute tests antivirus solutions regularly, and tests the protective capabilities, performance, and usability of each program.

A few programs share the top spot usually, and some more get the "top product" award. Kaspersky Internet Security is usually the top placed program in the test. Other antivirus solutions that get recommendations regularly are BitDefender Internet Security, Avira Antivirus Pro, Norton Internet Security or Trend Micro Internet Security.

The best antivirus for Windows Home User

The October 2017 ranking holds a surprise, as Kasperky's Internet Security product shared the first place with AhnLab's V3 Internet Security program for Windows. Both got a perfect 18/18 rating; the only two programs in the test that achieved that.

Kaspersky still got the edge with its 100% detection rating (opposed to 99.9% for AhnLab's product), and zero false positives (opposed to 1).

AhnLab managed to improve the company's program throughout the course of the past year. If you check results from previous test runs by AV Test, you will notice that it fared really well already, but that performance, protection and usability scores were not perfect back in 2016. This improved with every release, and it appears that the company struck gold finally.

AhnLab, Inc is a South Korean company that was founded back in 1995. It seems difficulty to purchase the product in many countries around the world though. Amazon does not carry it for instance.

AV Comparatives, another organization that tests antivirus and security solutions, did not include Ahnlab's V3 Internet Security product in any of its tests.

Avira's Antivirus Pro, BitDefender Internet Security, McAfee Internet Security and Norten Security were awarded with the top product award as well.

Windows Defender, the built-in Windows antivirus solution did not perform as well as in previous months. Its protection test score dropped by half a point to 5/6, and performance and usability ranked 5/6 and 4/6 respectively.

While that did not make it the worst rated product in the test, this honor goes to Qihoo 360 Total Security (Default Engine) with a protective rating of 1/6, only three products in total got worse protective ratings than Windows Defender.

Closing Words

While AhnLab's rating is commendable, its availability is not really, at least not in many countries around the world.