This test report is the second part of the February 2007 test run by AV-Comparatives. The same products were used and the results show the pure proactive detection capabilities that the products had three months ago. Interesting findings.
Many new viruses and other types of malware appear every day, this is why it's important that Anti-Virus products not only provide new updates, as often and as fast as possible, in order to identify those new threats, but also that they are able to detect such threats in advance with generic and/or heuristic techniques.
Without this ability the user has to wait for an updated release of the Anti-Virus product. Even if nowadays most anti-virus products provide daily or hourly updates, without heuristic/generic methods there is always a time-frame where the user is not protected, and much more important than time to release an update, is the time it takes to get that update deployed.
For this test new samples1 received between 2nd February and 2nd May 2007 have been used, which were all new to any tested product.The following 17 products were tested in this comparative (last signature updates and versions are from 2nd February 2007):
