Commentary: The anti-virus market

The anti-virus (AV) market is increasingly getting to be a difficult business for market incumbents.

The top players in this space — notably Symantec’s Norton and McAffee, followed by Trend Micro — have seen their market shares taken on by a slew of smaller competitors in the market, including Kaspersky Labs, ESET, Panda, AVAST and AVG, amongst others.

What’s more interesting is that some of these AV solutions from these smaller firms are good, and might even be better than the incumbents, if you can believe the latest anti-virus comparisons released by Anti-Malware Test Labs just about a week ago. Anti-Malware Test Labs is a Russian independent security research firm that is not affiliated to any software vendor, and has shared AV comparison tests with the public since 2007.

According to them, both DrWeb and Kaspersky, both Russia-based AV solutions, topped the list of the 17 AV software vendors. More than half the vendors flunked the comparison test as they didn’t defend against enough virus attacks in the testing.

The results, especially if you delve into the methodology, seem quite vigorous. Although to an observer like me far away it’s interesting to see that two Russian anti-virus firms topped the list.

Another interesting tidbit I spotted: Microsoft Security Essentials clocked in at second place (tied with Czech-based AVAST), which isn’t bad in terms of performance. Now, with Microsoft throwing their weight into this area and offering their security solutions for free, this is really going to put the squeeze on the AV space. No wonder the old guard software security firms are fleeing this area, and are looking at new pastures.

In any case, if you’re looking to purchase an anti-virus solution it makes sense to check out Anti-Malware Test Lab, AV-Comparatives.org, VB100 or ISCA Labs, which are some independent AV and security testing research firms in this space.