Enterprise Anti-Virus Testing

How hard should a security test be?

Thank you for opening this report. I hope you’ll be able to use it to get a better idea about which anti-malware products you might want to buy (or get rid of!)

Our reports help you choose the best enterprise anti-malware product that can protect you from ransomware and other types of attack.

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Product factsheets:

Broadcom Endpoint Security Enterprise Edition
CrowdStrike Falcon
ESET Endpoint Security
Fortinet FortiEDR

Kaspersky Endpoint Security
Microsoft Defender Antivirus (enterprise)
Sophos Intercept X
Trellix Endpoint Security
VIPRE Endpoint Security

Enterprise Anti-Virus Testing

The report starts off with a list of products, each of which win impressive-looking awards. But have you considered what those awards mean? How come there aren’t any massive losers in the list? How hard is this security test anyway?

Baseline Testing

There are lots of ways you can test products. You could prod a teddy bear and say, “well, that looks good enough,” or you could take it to pieces and analyse every component forensically for build and functional quality. “This toy looks safe, its parts are large, soft and non-toxic, and we can’t burn it easily. Plus, it’s got big, cute eyes.” This could be a baseline for cuddly toys: SAFE, with cuteness as an extra bonus.

For anti-malware products we have to consider a few different things, including the following:

• Is it really an anti-malware product? Is it at least basically functional?
• Can it determine a good quantity of common malware, without blocking lots of useful software?
• Can it stop the malware, as well as simply detecting it?

Email security services tested

Cyber criminals often use email as a way to start an attack

A primary vector for cyber attacks, email services need to be secure. Email platforms provide one level of security while third-party companies offer additional services, claiming to increase protection.

Choose the best email security solution

Email security services don’t handle all threats in the same way. Some will be stopped dead, while others can infiltrate fully. Somewhere in the middle we see email quarantine systems, Junk folders and edited messages – emails that have their links, attachments and even the words in the message tampered with.

This tampering may effectively remove a threat, or it may not. There is a lot to assessing an email security solution!

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How seriously do you take the email threat?

The approach that we take is to measure everything and then judge how important each result is. Our view is that keeping threats as far away from the user as possible is best. But sometimes security personnel need to see what’s coming in, so quarantines can be useful investigation tools. We have devised a scoring method that credits or penalises services according to our view on best outcomes.