2004 Desktop antivirus product reviews: Evaluating 10 antivirus products

2004 Desktop antivirus product reviews: Evaluating 10 antivirus products

Information Security tested 10 enterprise desktop antivirus products for attack evasion, resilience and the ability to detect malware other than viruses and worms, such

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as backdoors, spyware and *nix attack code. In computing our final grades for each product, we put particular emphasis on each product's enterprise management tools.

Specifically, we tested:

  • Computer Associate's eTrust Antivirus 7.0
  • F-Secure AntiVirus 5.42 and Policy Manager Console 5.5
  • Grisoft's AVG Anti-Virus 7.0 and AVGADMIN 7.0
  • Kaspersky Labs' Anti-Virus Network Control Centre 4.5.0
  • Network Associates' McAfee Active Virus Defense Suite 7.1.0
  • Panda Software's Panda ClientShield 1.91.01 and Admin Secure 3.01.01
  • PestPatrol Corporate Edition (Engine 5.5.2 and Management Console 1.0.0.7)
  • Sophos Anti-Virus 3.78
  • Symantec's SAV Corporate 9.0
  • Trend Micro's OfficeScan 5.5

Central Command, Eset Software and Microsoft declined to participate. F-Prot didn't respond to our invitation. Gordano responded to our request for products but didn't fit our criteria.

Throughout our testing, we looked at on-demand (immediate or scheduled) and real-time (upon file access) scanning.

We used a Windows 2000 Server as the enterprise antivirus server, managing four Windows XP Professional workstation systems. Each antivirus product was installed on a fresh operating system with no other applications. For safety, we moved all malware specimens via CD-ROM.


>> Read Ed Skoudis' review of 10 enterprise desktop antivirus products.

This was first published in June 2004

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