Hacked! Will your anti-malware protect you from targeted attacks?

Is anti-malware protection always strong? The news isn’t good. Discover your best options in our latest reports.

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Criminals routinely create ingenious scams and indiscriminate attacks designed to compromise the unlucky and, occasionally, foolish. But sometimes they focus on a specific target rather than casting a net wide in the hope of landing something interesting.

Targeted attacks can range from basic, like an email simply asking you to send some money to an account, through to extremely devious and technical. If you received an email from your accountant with an attached PDF or Excel spreadsheet would you open it?

Most would and all that then stands between them and a successful hack (because the email was a trick and contained a dodgy document that gives remote control to the attacker) is the security software running on their PC. How good is your anti-malware protection?

Anti-malware protection from different threats

In this test we’ve included indiscriminate, public attacks that come at victims from the web and via email, but we’ve also included some devious targeted attacks to see how well-protected potential victims would be.

We’ve not created any new types of threat and we’ve not discovered and used ‘zero day’ attacks. Instead we took tools that are freely distributed online and are well-known to penetration testers and criminals alike. We used these to generate threats that are realistic representations of what someone could quite easily put together to attack you or your business.

The results are extremely worrying. While a few products were excellent at detecting and protecting against these threats many more were less useful. We will continue this work and report any progress that these companies make in improving their products.

See if your anti-malware protection is up to scratch!

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