LinuxWorld recently hosted a “Fight Club”. No, Brad Pitt was not on site but they did manage to bring together most of the Anti-Virus programs that we have come to know and trust. What they learned probably won’t shock you all that much. A lot of common Anti-Virus software is pretty bad.

The Findings

10 common Anti-Virus programs were tested against 25 different virus’. Of the ten tested, only three caught all 25 of the virus’. Two programs caught about 94% of the virus’, one caught 89% and WatchGuard (A Linux AV tool) managed to catch less than 6%.

Web 2.0 Roundup

The best of breed for this test were the AV products from Kaspersky, Symantec and Clam AV. Next, coming in at 94% success were FProt and Sophos; not far behind was McAfee. The lesson is that just because an Anti-Virus program is expensive, does not mean that it is effective. Clam AV, an open source tool, managed was one of the best performing programs of the bunch.

To learn more about this test, check out this article from Dark Reading.

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