This report is an excerpt of the Business Security Test 2019 (August – November). For more details, please click here.

Introduction

This is a short fact sheet for our Business Main-Test Series, containing the results of the Business Malware Protection Test (September) and Business Real-World Protection Test (August-September). The full report, including the Performance Test and product reviews, will be released in December.

To be certified in December as an “Approved Business Product” by AV-Comparatives, the tested products must score at least 90% in the Malware Protection Test, and at least 90% in the overall Real-World Protection Test (i.e. over the course of 4 months), with zero false alarms on common business software. Tested products must also avoid major performance issues and have fixed all reported bugs in order to gain certification.

Please note that the results of the Business Main-Test Series cannot be compared with the results of the Consumer Main-Test Series, as the tests are done at different times, with different sets, different settings, etc.

Tested Products

The following products were tested under Windows 10 1903 64-bit and are included in this factsheet:

Information about additional third-party engines/signatures used by some of the products: Cisco, FireEye, Seqrite and VIPRE use the Bitdefender engine (in addition to their own protection features).

Note that Endgame was acquired by Elastic N.V. on Oct 8, 2019. The product is now called Elastic Endpoint Security.

In business environments, and with business products in general, it is usual for products to be configured by the system administrator, in accordance with vendor’s guidelines, and so we invited all vendors to configure their respective products. About half of the vendors provide their products with optimal default settings which are ready to use, and did therefore not change any settings. Cloud and PUA detection have been activated in all products. We currently do not include any PUA in our malware tests.

Below we have listed relevant deviations from default settings (i.e. setting changes applied by the vendors):

Bitdefender: “HyperDetect”, “Device Sensor” and “EDR Sensor” disabled.

Cisco: everything enabled.

CrowdStrike: everything enabled and set to maximum, i.e. “Extra Aggressive”.

Endgame: Enabled Software and Hardware protection options: all enabled; Protected Applications: “Browser”, “Microsoft Suite” (incl. Fltdr.exe and EQNEDT32.exe), “Java” and “Adobe”. Malware (on-execution and on-write): “On – Prevent mode”; Process Injection: “On – Prevent mode”; Options: all enabled; “Aggressive” threshold. Adversary behaviors: all enabled; Credential dumping: enabled; Ransomware: disabled. Note that settings were renamed in the newer version.

FireEye: “Real-Time Indicator Detection” disabled, “Exploit Guard” and “Malware Protection” enabled.

Fortinet: Real-Time protection, FortiSandbox, Webfilter and Application Firewall (in order to use Detect & Block Exploits) enabled.

McAfee: “Email attachment scanning” enabled; “Real Protect” enabled and set to “high” sensitivity, “read/write scan of Shadow Copy Volumes” disabled, “Access Protection” and “Exploit Prevention” disabled.

Microsoft: Cloud protection level set to “High”.

Sophos: “Web Control” and “Protect against data loss” disabled.

SparkCognition: all “Policy Settings” and all “Attack Vectors” settings enabled.

Trend Micro: Behaviour monitoring: “Monitor new encountered programs downloaded through web” enabled; “Certified Safe Software Service for Behaviour monitoring” enabled; “Smart Protection Service Proxy” enabled; “Use HTTPS for scan queries” enabled; Web Reputation Security Level set to Medium; “Send queries to Smart Protection Servers” disabled; “Block pages containing malicious script” enabled; Real-Time Scan set to scan “All scannable files”, “Scan compressed files to Maximum layers 6”; “CVE exploit scanning for downloaded files” enabled; “ActiveAction for probable virus/malware” set to Quarantine; Cleanup type set to “Advanced cleanup” and “Run cleanup when probable virus/malware is detected” enabled; “Block processes commonly associated with ransomware” enabled; “Anti-Exploit Protection” enabled; all “Suspicious Connection Settings” enabled and set to Block.

Avast, ESET, K7, Kaspersky, Panda, Seqrite, Symantec, VIPRE: default settings.

Test Results

Real-World Protection Test (August-September)

This fact sheet gives a brief overview of the results of the Business Real-World Protection Test run in August and September 2019. The overall business product reports (each covering four months) will be released in July and December. For more information about this Real-World Protection Test, please read the details available at https://www.av-comparatives.org. The results are based on a test set consisting of 371 test cases (such as malicious URLs), tested from the beginning of August till the end of September.

Blocked User dependent Compromised PROTECTION RATE

[Blocked % + (User dependent %)/2]* False Alarms ESET 371 – – 100% 1 Symantec 371 – – 100% 3 Panda 371 – – 100% 7 Bitdefender 371 – – 100% 13 Microsoft 370 1 – 99.9% 35 Endgame 370 – 1 99.7% 12 VIPRE 369 – 2 99.5% 1 K7 369 – 2 99.5% 2 Kaspersky, Sophos, SparkCognition 368 – 3 99.2% 0 McAfee 368 – 3 99.2% 3 Seqrite 365 6 – 99.2% 6 FireEye 366 – 5 98.7% 0 CrowdStrike 365 – 6 98.4% 1 Fortinet 365 – 6 98.4% 2 Trend Micro 365 – 6 98.4% 10 Cisco 364 – 7 98.1% 0 Avast 364 – 7 98.1% 1

* User-dependent cases are given half credit. For example, if a program blocks 80% by itself, and another 20% of cases are user-dependent, we give half credit for the 20%, i.e. 10%, so it gets 90% altogether.

Malware Protection Test (September)

The Malware Protection Test assesses a security program’s ability to protect a system against infection by malicious files before, during or after execution. The methodology used for each product tested is as follows. Prior to execution, all the test samples are subjected to on-access scans (if this feature is available) by the security program (e.g. while copying the files over the network). Any samples that have not been detected by the on-access scanner are then executed on the test system, with Internet/cloud access available, to allow e.g. behavioral detection features to come into play. If a product does not prevent or reverse all the changes made by a particular malware sample within a given time period, that test case is considered to be a miss. For this test, 1,278 recent malware samples were used.

False positive (false alarm) test with common business software

A false alarm test done with common business software was also performed. As expected, all the tested products hat zero false alarms on common business software.

The following chart shows the results of the Business Malware Protection Test:

Malware Protection Rate False Alarms on common business software Avast. SparkCognition, Trend Micro 100% 0 Microsoft, Panda, Seqrite 99.9% 0 Bitdefender, Endgame, K7, McAfee, Sophos 99.8% 0 Symantec, VIPRE 99.7% 0 Cisco 99.5% 0 Fortinet, Kaspersky 99.4% 0 ESET 99.3% 0 FireEye* 96.2% 0 Crowdstrike 96.0% 0

*A FireEye product issue was uncovered during the Malware Protection Test which led to some missed detections. The bug has now been fixed.

In order to better evaluate the products’ detection accuracy and file detection capabilities (ability to distinguish good files from malicious files), we also performed a false alarm test on non-business software and uncommon files. This is provided mainly just as additional information, especially for organisations which often use uncommon non-business software or their own self-developed software. The results do not affect the overall test score or the Approved Business Product award. The false alarms found were promptly fixed by the respective vendors.

FP rate Number of FPs on

non-business software Very low 0 - 5 Low 6 - 25 Medium 26 - 50 High 51 - 100 Very high 101 - 200 Remarkably high > 200

FP rate on non-business software Avast, Bitdefender, Cisco, ESET, Fortinet, K7, Kaspersky, Seqrite, Symantec Very low CrowdStrike, FireEye, McAfee, Microsoft, Panda, Sophos Low Endgame, Trend Micro, VIPRE Medium SparkCognition High – Very high – Remarkably high

Copyright and Disclaimer

This publication is Copyright © 2019 by AV-Comparatives ®. Any use of the results, etc. in whole or in part, is ONLY permitted after the explicit written agreement of the management board of AV-Comparatives prior to any publication. AV-Comparatives and its testers cannot be held liable for any damage or loss, which might occur as result of, or in connection with, the use of the information provided in this paper. We take every possible care to ensure the correctness of the basic data, but a liability for the correctness of the test results cannot be taken by any representative of AV-Comparatives. We do not give any guarantee of the correctness, completeness, or suitability for a specific purpose of any of the information/content provided at any given time. No one else involved in creating, producing or delivering test results shall be liable for any indirect, special or consequential damage, or loss of profits, arising out of, or related to, the use or inability to use, the services provided by the website, test documents or any related data.

For more information about AV-Comparatives and the testing methodologies, please visit our website.

AV-Comparatives

(October 2019)