SE Labs’ Q3 Report Reveals Rise in Home Anti-Malware Products Missing ‘Easy’ Threats

SE LABS Ⓡ, the cyber security testing authority, announced today that it has seen a worrying rise of home user anti-malware products not detecting threats that should be easily discovered. In the company’s latest quarterly evaluation reports, seven out of ten products missed ‘public’ malware threats. While targeted attacks continued to trip up some products in all three of the Home, SMB and Enterprise categories.

“For the third quarter in a row, we’ve seen many of the home user endpoint security products tested compromised by public threats. This reverses the trend of several years whereby the majority of endpoints would block public threats without hesitation,” says Simon Edwards, Founder and CEO of SE Labs. “Although they were only compromised by one or two threats, we want to highlight it as the typical user of home security products is more vulnerable to the widespread attacks from the web.”

SE Labs’ quarterly evaluations tests endpoint security products against ‘public’ malware found to be live on the internet at the time, alongside full-on hacking attacks. This type of public threat evaluation checks a product’s familiarity with common threats and its ability to keep its databases current.

In the Home Anti-Malware Security Evaluation, only products from Kaspersky, McAfee and Norton achieved a 100% Total Accuracy rating. These products received AAA awards, as did those from Microsoft, Sophos, Avast, Scanguard and Webroot. Panda and TotalAV performed well enough to achieve AA ratings.

Strong performance by products from Kaspersky, Broadcom and Sophos was rewarded with a 100% Total Accuracy Rating in the Small Business Endpoint Security Evaluation. Microsoft and Bitdefender were close behind with 99%. While a 100% Legitimate Accuracy Rating boosted Webroot’s 91% Protection Accuracy Rating to an overall Total Accuracy Rating of 97%.

Products from Kaspersky, Broadcom, Sophos, ESET and CrowdStrike produced extremely good results in the Enterprise Endpoint Security Evaluation. They all achieved a 100% accuracy rating due to a combination of their ability to block malicious URLs, handle exploits and correctly classify applications, with Microsoft closely behind with a near perfect 99%. Trellix followed with 97% after running into problems with some targeted attacks.

All the reports can be downloaded for free from SE Labs website: https://selabs.uk/reports/