Panda Cloud Antivirus

We are happy to announce the availability of Panda Cloud Antivirus version 2.1.1!

If you are reading this post after seeing a “Panda Cloud Antivirus has upgraded automatically!” message on your Desktop traybar, then you already have the latest version installed and running, and you don’t have to do anything else. If your version of Panda Cloud Antivirus hasn’t upgraded yet to version 2.1.1, don’t worry. As we are releasing the automatic, transparent upgrade little by little, your copy of Panda Cloud Antivirus will upgrade itself automatically in a few days.

Quality of this new version comes guaranteed by the “Windows 8 Compatible” logo. After passing the requirements for Windows 8 operating system compatibility, Panda Cloud Antivirus 2.1.1 earned the compatibility certification and the right to display this logo which recognizes the effort done by the team to offer our Community a certified security solution with the best protection and minimal resource consumption in all compatible platforms.

Version 2.1.1 is a maintenance upgrade from version 2.1. It includes improvements to the Panda Cloud Antivirus heuristic technologies and to new anti-exploit protection, and fixes some bugs reported by the user community. The bug fixes are the following:

• Fixed problem with “blocking of files until results are returned from the cloud – time settings”.
• Fixed problem under certain situations when GUI console was not opened.
• Fixed some linguistic errors.
• Fixed problem with promotional banner under certain situations after upgrading to Panda Cloud Antivirus PRO Edition.
• Fixed information shown (remote IP address) in firewall popups.

Remember that if you have any problems with Panda Cloud Antivirus, you can always ask for help at our Technical Support Forum.

We are happy to announce that Panda Cloud Antivirus Free has been awarded VB100 certification after being tested alongside 33 other antivirus solutions (22 awarded) in Virus Bulletin’s December comparative review on Windows 8. We are delighted to have obtained the VB100 certification twice in a year! This certification recognizes our efforts and success in offering lightweight solutions with the best disinfection rates for the new Windows 8 operating system as well.

Testing was made up of three main parts: on-demand tests, on-access tests, and false positive tests. Panda Cloud Antivirus Free obtained a 100% perfect result in the on-demand and on-access tests, as well as zero false positives.

The tests showed that Panda Cloud Antivirus Free was one of the fastest and least resource-intensive antivirus products available, clearly outperforming other free solutions from Avast, AVG or Microsoft in CPU and memory consumption. Virus Bulletin also praised the product’s interface and ease of use, as well as the benefits provided by a 100% cloud-based solution.

This award follows the VB100 certification received by Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro in September 2012, and the certifications awarded to Panda Cloud Antivirus Free by the independent labs AV-Test.org and AV-Comparatives in 2012.

We will do our best to continue improving our protection level and lightness in every release as we have done in version 2.1 with anti-exploit protection. Protection, Lightness and the Community (= you) are the key of Panda Cloud Antivirus success.

Thanks a lot for your confidence!

We are extremely happy to announce that after many years we have started participating again in the VB100 tests. We have not done so before mainly because their testing methodology did not consider cloud-scanning. But they have recently implemented cloud-scanning in their test methodologies and we started participating again.

VB100 certification is granted to products that prove a 100% detection rate for malware samples listed as “In the Wild” by the WildList Organization. To display a VB100 logo, a product must generate no false positives when scanning an extensive set of goodware samples. The comparative review was conducted on a system running Windows 7 Professional. Testing was made up of three main parts: on-demand tests, on-access tests, and false positive tests. Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro obtained a 100% perfect result in the on-demand and on-access tests, as well as zero false positives.

Additionally, Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro recorded an installation time of 30 seconds, the fastest of all tested products. Virus Bulletin also praised the product’s interface and ease of use.

More information at http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archive/test?recent=1

Being the first free cloud-based antivirus, we sometimes read people’s comments and posts about Panda Cloud Antivirus requiring an active Internet connection to be effective. While we’ve always said that this is not the case due to the way we’ve architectured the cloud-based protection, these comments are sometimes still posted by people who are not familiar with the product.

AV-Comparatives.org just released the results of their “Retrospective Test” which basically freezes AV products without allowing them to update their signatures nor connect to cloud-based scanning services, and tests them against new viruses.

While the concept of testing against Internet-enabled viruses without Internet connectivity is somewhat unrealistic, we are happy to announce that even without Internet connectivity Panda Cloud Antivirus achieved the highest rating “Advanced+” given by AV-Comparatives.org. Even without Internet connectivity Panda Cloud Antivirus provided better offline detection than non-cloud free products from Avira, AVG and Microsoft.

AV-Test.org has released their March/April Full Product Tests results. They can be seen online at http://www.av-test.org/en/tests/home-user/marapr-2012/.

We are happy to announce that Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.5.2 has achieved the highest score in  usability.

“Panda Cloud Antivirus is one of the fastest (lightest) products we’ve ever tested. Even then, the product offered a stellar protection against all kinds of malware and it performed very well in our 0day testing. Panda Cloud Antivirus offers a stellar protection against malware attacks, and it ranked higher than some paid Internet Security offerings from other vendors. We congratulate Panda for their high ranks in our comprehensive tests!” Andreas Marx, CEO AV-Test.org.

The usability section of the test looks at, among other things, an antivirus product’s ability to not slow down the computer during daily, normal use. In this section of the test Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.5.2 achieved a score of 7 while the average of all antivirus products tested was a 10 (the lower the better). The “slowest” product achieved a score of 15.

Another section of the usability testing looks at false positives or false detections of legitimate software as malware during a system scan. Over half a million known good files were tested and Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.5.2 only reported 3 as malware. That’s a 0.0006% false positive rate. The average of all products tested was 10 false positives (0.002%) and the product with the most false positives had 43 (0.01%).

Finally AV-Test.org also looks at false warnings or false blockings of certain actions during download, installation and use of legitimate software. In this test Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.5.2 performed flawlessly with 0 false warnings, while the worse offender had 5 false warnings.

We are very happy with these results as they validate the main benefit of lightness and ease of use of Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.5.2, which were the main objective we had in mind when developing this product.

Of course protection and repair are also very important parts of the tests. In this respect Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.5.2 performed very well also, achieving a 5.0 protection score as compared to other free antivirus such as Avast (4.5) and Microsoft Security Essentials (3.0). In repair we did not do as good a job as we should have. Even though Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.5.2 still achieved a respectable 4.0 which is ahead of Avast’s 3.0, we are not happy with these results and are working very hard to improve this metric with the new Panda Cloud Antivirus 2.0 which will be released this year.

AV-Comparatives has released their On-Demand antivirus test and we are happy to report that Panda Cloud Antivirus has achieved the top ranking of ADVANCED+.

The test compared Panda Cloud Antivirus to 19 other antivirus programs. Panda Cloud Antivirus successfully detected 98.6 percent of the more than 300,000 samples used by AV-Comparatives.org, performing better than free solutions from Avast, AVG and Microsoft and paid programs from Eset or Trend Micro, and reinforcing the product’s powerful protection capabilities.

The AV-Comparatives.org tests also examined false positives, which the lab recommends people consider when evaluating products as they can sometimes cause as much trouble as real infections. Panda only reported 10 whereas other antivirus solutions reported 54 false positives on average. The full report is available at http://www.av-comparatives.org/en/comparativesreviews/detection-test

We are happy to announce that AV-Test.org recently released their independent testing results of their latest January/February 2012 test runs. These tests put antivirus and security products through a thorough real-world testing scenario which is broken down in three big areas: Protection, Repair and Usability.

The results couldn’t be much better for Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.5.1 as we outscored all other free antivirus products tested (and many of the paid and full suites!). Thanks to all our users who are providing feedback in our Support Forum to help us make The Best Free Antivirus!

AV-Test.org has just released the September & October test results of its Full Product Monthly tests. More information at http://www.av-test.org/en/tests/test-reports/. This is the second batch of test reports in which Panda participates with Panda Cloud Antivirus FREE Edition.

Of course we are happy to see that Panda Cloud Antivirus FREE Edition has achieved certification with some good scores. But I would like to focus this post on the performance part of the test, which is where Panda Cloud Antivirus FREE Edition has really shined. Of course an AV product needs to detect as much malware as possible with as little false positives as possible. But nowadays the top AV products are very aligned in both these respects. So what is it that makes the difference then when choosing an AV? Many people will say its the performance and how it behaves on your individual system. Will it slow you down? Will it consume too much memory or CPU cycles? How will it impact your system? Many times a big performance hit will make the best of AVs with the highest detection rates and lowest FPs useless if they don’t allow the user to work with his or her PC.

There are some (not many) AV performance tests out there. Unfortunately most of the are sponsored by such or such vendor, which is not ideal as the vendor pays for the test and therefore choose what the test should look at, which coincidentally will be the performance areas the sponsoring vendor is good at, instead of looking at the overall performance hit. The Passmark tests sponsored by Symantec are a good example of this. Eugene has a good criticism of these type of sponsored tests (google it). Luckly the AV-Test performance review looks at the overall performance hit and this is where the architectural design of CloudAV really shows how it improves performance over traditional AV:

AV-Test.org September/October 2011 Full Product Test Reports available at http://www.av-test.org/en/tests/test-reports/

Hot off the trails of the great debut of Panda Cloud Antivirus at AV-Comparatives with an Advanced+ rating, now Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition is also taking part of the Full Product / Real-World tests of AV-Test.org.

The results are pretty good. Both Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition and Panda Internet Security 2012 achieved some of the top scores in protection. In addition Panda Cloud Antivirus achieved very good scores for usability, with very little slowdown of the test computers and zero false positives (when the industry average for this test was 17 false positives).

The full reports can be read online for both Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition and Panda Internet Security 2012.

AV-Comparatives.org just published its latest detection test. This test takes into consideration detection of recent malware as well as false positives. This is the first time that Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition participates in AV-Comparatives.org independent tests.

We’re happy to announce that the results couldn’t be much better. Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition achieved the highest rating (Advanced+) by being one of the AVs with the highest detection and lowest false positive ratings of the 20 products tested. Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition even got higher scores both in detection and false positives than paid-for security solutions from Kasperspky, ESET, McAfee, Trend Micro and Symantec and also higher scores than other free solutions by Avast and AVG.

You can read the full report at AV-Comparatives.org testing site.