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Best Security Software.com |
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Internet Security ReviewsCan You Trust Internet Security Software Reviews?I believe it's time for a talk about Internet security reviews. The first thing we want to talk about is objective versus subjective information. Software companies make shiny web sites trumpeting their products' features and benefits so that you'll buy their products. Resellers of these products (including me), review them and offer links to them for a commission. So, how do you know if the product really does what it says? After all, us web site owners are just out to make a fast buck, right? Well, there's nothing wrong with making money but it's tempting to push the highest commission products as the "best" based on biased Internet security reviews. One way to help avoid this is to use independent testing results for the product's performance and opinion for everything else. What I'm trying to do here is to separate the more objective testing from the more subjective opinions in Internet security reviews. In a departure from my 2009 reviews, I'm going for a more objective measure that doesn't include my opinions on effectiveness. I'll try to do that by reporting the results from three of the most respected, large scale independent testing organizations (AV-Test, AV-Comparatives, and Virus Bulletin) as the objective part and then give you my opinions on the user interface, setup options, scan times, etc as the subjective part. I don't fault web sites and magazines for trying to do their own Internet security reviews but there's a big problem: they don't have the resources to do it justice. Each one uses different malware samples on different computers and operating systems under different conditions, etc. Furthermore, the tests they do are small in comparison to the large independent labs whose mission it is to do a variety of tests on large sample sizes and in various environments. The big labs are the ones that get closest to really knowing what "best" means. Now, that being said, I personally still enjoy reading pcmag.com reviews. Neil J. Rubenking has interesting things to say in my opinion and the reviews are thorough and well laid out. But, I base my buying decisions on the AV-Test, AV Comparatives, and Virus Bulletin's results plus my preference for user interface, performance, and overall "likability factor" of the company. That's how I suggest you approach this too. So, to drive the point home, if a product does extremely well in one or more of the aforementioned testing labs' results but has a difficult user interface, brings your computer to a crawl, or just annoys you in some other way, then it might not be the best choice for you. All of the top rated products will keep you reasonably safe from malware but none of them get it all. Since most average users aren't security experts, they believe that buying the "best" security suite in some magazine's Internet security reviews will protect them. This is simply not true. There are so many ways to exploit your computer that no security product can hope to fully protect you. What's more, once you dig into it you'll realize that there is no such thing as a completely unbiased review. There is too much malware, too many new threats every day, and too many other variables to even think about getting completely objective results. I make the point in several places that none of the Internet security products can identify all threats. In this interview from: NetworkWorld.com, security expert, Marc Maiffret says this: What's your take on the security vendor community today? Maiffret: When you look at the industry and the mainstay players, they'll even tell you that their [malware] signature technology doesn't work anymore but that hey, "we have this great behavior-anomaly technology." What they don't tell you, and what the IT community can see, is that with those technologies you are either at one end of the spectrum or the other. If you tune the technology up you may catch a lot of things, but that includes a lot of false positives. At the other end, the admins tune it down to reduce the false positives but then they end up missing stuff. At the end of the day, you really can't have either of these scenarios, but everyone knows we can't have a utopia, either. The reality is that we're at the point where it's not even the sophisticated attacks that cause all the problems. We're seeing it with every-day spyware. It's very hard to tell the two apart from a threat perspective. In the process, we've seen a massive failure of the vendor community to grasp these things. And Bruce Schneier, "the father of cryptography", said: "What is the most over-hyped topic in the security field? It's a serious problem with our industry. Companies emerge selling one thing: firewalls, public key infrastructure, biometric login, or whatever. In order for them to convince customers, as many as possible, to buy their stuff, they have to over-hype it. They have to claim that their solution is the one solution everyone needs. " -- Bruce Schneier from the article at csoonline.com So, take your pick of the best available software and then get more information about securing your computer and Internet connections. You'll be amazed at how many other holes there are once you look into it. Update June 2010: There's a push for a more uniform way of testing security software. Some of you might be nerdy enough to want to read this article on CSO Online. Update June 2010: I just discovered this terrific piece by Brian Krebs. It also drives home the fact that "zero day" malware (brand spanking new malware that has no virus definition for it yet) is showing up at the rate of 100,000 new samples per day! Here's a quote: "I'm not quarreling with the proposition that the industry misses a lot of malware. That's incontrovertible, when every day we're dealing with close to 100,000 new malware samples. In fact, that sort of level of detection that NSS is talking about - 50 to 60 percent right out of the gate - sounds realistic to me." Please read the Best Internet Security pages for more information. I want you to be as secure as possible. For more information see the Triple E Keys Awards page for an explanation of how I handle the awards. 
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