Panda Cloud Antivirus

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.

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.

As you’ve probably heard by now there’s a very nasty 0-day vulnerability in Adobe (CVE-2010-1297) that’s being used to infect people using drive-by exploits from infected websites. Of course all AV vendors are currently struggling and in a hurry to release updated signatures to detect the different variations of malicious PDF files that are being released into the wild.

Thanks to the Behavioural Blocking engine, users of Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition do not need to worry about this or any other Adobe 0-day as these types of exploits are blocked generically and automatically.

In the following video by Sean-Paul from PandaLabs you can see how PCAV blocks these 0-day exploits generically.

Thanks Sean-Paul & David from PandaLabs for all your work with KRE.

    
I was recently pointed to a comparative study of free antivirus solutions done by PC World and performed by AV-Test.org, comparing Panda Cloud Antivirus, Avira, avast!, Microsoft Security Essentials, AVG, Comodo, PC Tools, and ClamAV.

Altough the editorial did not include Panda Cloud Antivirus in the ranking chart as it could not test the retrospective detection using 2 and 4 week old signatures (as Panda Cloud Antivirus works in the cloud and therefore cannot use 2 & 4 week old signatures), it had this to say about Panda Cloud Antivirus:

http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/product/290839/review/cloud_antivirus.html

Among all of the free antivirus software we tested for our latest roundup, Panda Cloud Antivirus was the best app at blocking known malware.

The approach is intended to take advantage of the latest signatures without the need for signature-database updates–and if its excellent showing at detecting malware in AV-Test.org’s zoo of half a million samples is any indication, the approach works. Panda’s app produced an impressive 99.4 percent overall detection rate.

For now, we can’t give Panda’s app a complete score, but its impressive ability to detect malware makes it well worth keeping an eye on.

The final detection rate ranking of the full collection of malware, taking into consideration updated sigs and products, is the following:

1. Panda: 99.4%
2. Avira: 98.9%
3. Avast: 98.2%
4. MSE: 97.8%
5. AVG: 95.8%
6. Comodo: 74.6%

This is great news and motivates us even more to continue working hard to release a 1.0 version that offers top detection and protection for free