By DPA
Hanover : Anti-virus software is increasingly losing ground in the battle to provide reliable protection for PCs.
The Hanover-based c’t magazine tested 17 current programmes recently. Each piece of software was tested for recognition of more than a million different pests, including trojans, viruses, worms and bots.
Two products were able to identify more than 99 percent of the malicious intruders. Four other virus scanners caught at least 95 percent and were hence awarded a grade of very good.
Many of the tested programmes demonstrated significant weaknesses when it came to detecting previously unknown pests, c’t reports. This requires heuristic methods, which means scanning for specific patterns in programme code.
Even more concerning is that almost all of the programmes fared worse during heuristic testing than they did a year ago.
Beyond heuristics, several programmes work with a system called “behavioural blocking”. That means that anti virus programmes should recognise malicious software based on its behaviour.
This also produced “results that were a bit disappointing”, the magazine reports. The experts also criticised the programmes for a lack of tools to handle rootkits, which are used to conceal malicious programmes.
If a user suspects that their system might be infected with a rootkit, then the best remedy is a rescue CD, which unfortunately is not included with most anti-virus software.