Panda Cloud Antivirus

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!

We are happy to announce the availability of Panda Cloud Antivirus version 1.5.2. If you are reading this after seeing a “Panda Cloud Antivirus has upgraded automatically!” message on your Desktop traybar, then you already have this latest version installed and running and you don’t have to do anything else. In case you are interested you can read about the fixes introduced in this version in this blog post. If your version of Panda Cloud Antivirus hasn’t upgraded yet to version 1.5.2 yet don’t worry. As we are releasing the automatic and transparent upgrade little by little in a few days your copy of Panda Cloud Antivirus will upgrade itself automatically.

Version 1.5.2 is a maintenance upgrade from version 1.5.1 which fixes some bugs reported by the user community. The bug fixes included are the following:

• Improved on-demand scanning speeds, specially under Windows 7.
• Improved integration with Collective Intelligence backend to obtain new malware variants even faster.
• New toolbar version 3.0 with Google search instead of Yahoo search.
• Fixed slowdowns while deleting files from the computer.
• Fixed BSOD under certain conditions when unloading one of the Panda drivers.
• Fixed synchronization erros (same as already released hotfix).
• Fixed issues scanning certain type of folders (as reported by AV-Comparatives)
• Fixed upgrade notification popup showing up every 20 minutes.
• Fixed problem of certain auxiliary files being written to the root of the drive when ProgramData directory could not be found.
• Fixed disinfection problem under certain conditions on malware running in memory.
• Fixed problem under certain situations when a malware detected without Internet connectivity was not recorded in the event report.
• Fixed problems disinfecting certain malware with specific format and characteristics.

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

Also if you like Panda Cloud Antivirus don’t forget to help us grow the community of  users. The more we are, the better protection we get. Make sure to click on the “I like CloudAV” button on the main window to easily protect your community of friends and family by letting them know about Panda Cloud Antivirus.

WinDefend, our newest Junior Moderator has posted a giveaway of 2-year PRO License Keys for 5 lucky users after we hit our 20.000 fan mark at our facebook page over at www.facebook.com/cloudantivirus.

Check it out:
http://www.cloudantivirus.com/forum/thread.jspa?threadID=62106&tstart=0

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/

If you haven’t seen it already, Panda Cloud Antivirus cloud-scanning backend, Collective Intelligence, has reached its 200 millionth file analyzed in the last few hours.

Being one of the first cloud-scanning backends in the AV industry, Panda’s Collective Intelligence processes automatically over 250.000 new files every day. It is able to automatically analyze new files, determine if they are malicious or not, create signatures for the malicious ones and respond to threats on user’s PC’s in real-time without requiring AV signature updates. In addition it also is able to create heuristic determinations for completely new and unknown malware which it has never seen before without actually having the file, as well as using prevalence to make determinations and prioritizations, making Panda’s Collective Intelligence the most advanced cloud-scanning technology in the market.

More information:
http://www.cloudantivirus.com/en/threat-information/
http://press.pandasecurity.com/usa/news/panda-security-processes-200-millionth-malware-file-via-the-cloud/

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.

Finally the new Panda Cloud Antivirus beta is here, getting us closer and closer to the expected Panda Cloud Antivirus 2.0 release. Version 1.9.1 incorporates a full fledged firewall with application and system rules. This new firewall and its settings is available from a new tab off the main GUI.

The full firewall included in this beta version is a smart community-based firewall which will automatically assign inbound and outbound communication privileges to processes. The automatic assignment is performed depending on its risk assessment as well as the direction of the communication which is being initiated. So if an OUTBOUND connection is being made by a Secure or Low Risk process, the process is allowed to communicate automatically. Alternatively if a process is deemed riskier, a prompt will ask the user to choose whether to allow or block the communication. A similar although stricter approach is used for INBOUND connections.

The risk assessment of executed processes is shown in the Process Monitor window of the main GUI as shown in the first picture of this blog post. This is calculated automatically based on many different conditions, such as safe lists, digital signatures, telemetry and prevalence, automated analysis of processes, etc.

However users can also manually manage the firewall rules by adding new ones, editing, deleting, importing and exporting rules and prioritizing certain rules over others. This is easily done from the Program Control window under the firewall tab of the main GUI as shown in the next picture.

Finally there’s also a lot of improvements in the antivirus part of the program, as always targeted at making Panda Cloud Antivirus even lighter and faster, as well as a usual batch of bug fixes. The full changelog can be seen below.