Once again, Lavasoft's Ad-Aware has been awarded the "Advanced+ 3 stars for File Detection Test of Malicious Softwares" from AV-Comparatives for September 2014!

Some highlights from detection and protection tests (full test results listed here) include:

• Malware detection against new threats - Ad-Aware 11 detected am impressive 99.4% more threats compared to avast! (98.6%) and AVG 98.4%)
• False positives – Ad-Aware 11 detected lee false positives, missing almost three times fewer samples than McAfee and less than 20x fewer samples than Avast.

Missed samples

The graph below shows the test results against "out-of-box" malware detection provided by Microsoft Windows. In Windows 8, this is provided by Windows Defender, which is pre-installed by default with the operating system. The equivalent in Windows 7 is Microsoft Security Essentials, which is not pre-installed, but can easily be added for free as an option via the Windows Update service. We use this to compare the value of this feature – i.e. static malware detection - provided to users of third-party Anti-Virus solutions.

False positive (false alarm) test

In order to better evaluate the quality of the file detection capabilities (distinguish good files from malicious files) of anti-virus products, we provide a false alarm test. False alarms can sometimes cause as much trouble as a real infection. Please consider the false alarm rate when looking at the detection rates, as a product which is prone to false alarms achieves higher detection rates more easily. The lower the false positives means that the antivirus’ performance is very solid.

Lavasoft Ad-Aware Free Antivirus+

Version: 11.3.6321.0
Missed samples: 0.6%
False positives: 6 (low FPs)