Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 earns another top rating from AV-Comparatives

Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions, announces that Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009’s proactive protection has once again received top marks from the authoritative AV-Comparatives test lab. The Kaspersky Lab product demonstrated high-level heuristic detection of new malware with a minimal amount of false positives.

The Austrian antivirus test laboratory AV-Comparatives has published the second part of its report on testing conducted in February 2009 in which 16 popular antivirus products took part. The second part of the report contains test results for proactive, heuristic detection. Kaspersky Lab was also awarded a top rating of Advanced+ for the first part of February’s test.

Proactive detection allows new malicious programs whose signatures have not yet been added to antivirus databases to be detected. This functionality is becoming increasingly important due to the increasing numbers of new malicious programs and their modifications. A vital criterion when evaluating an antivirus solution today is the level of heuristic detection: the percentage of new malware detected without the use of signatures and without the launch or imitated launch of questionable software.

During testing by AV-Comparatives, the antivirus solutions were evaluated on criteria such as their level of heuristic detection and number of false positives generated. The malware samples used during detection level testing were collected during the period 9-16 February, 2009 – the week after the products’ signature databases were last updated. Testing for false positives was conducted using a collection of clean files. Any technology that enabled the use of global resources or “in-the-cloud” protection was turned off.

Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 received AV-Comparatives’ top rating of Advanced+, after demonstrating excellent heuristic detection of malware and a negligible amount of false positives. Only two other products apart from Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 received an Advanced+ rating.

Further information about the new generation of Kaspersky Lab personal products can be found on the Kaspersky Lab site at www.kaspersky.com/homeuser. In addition, free trial versions of Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 and Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 are available at www.kaspersky.com/trials.