AV-Test.org, an independent test lab in Germany has been feeding us test results for the emerging 2010 generation of anti-malware products. Previously we have reported results from them for Panda and Kaspersky. Today they gave us results for the public beta versions of Norton Antivirus 2010 and Norton Internet Security 2010.
The Norton Antivirus 2010 beta may be obtainedhere.
They tested the products in 32-bit US English versions on Windows XP SP3 and Vista SP1. All tests were performed on July 6, which is worth noting since Symantec, like everyone these days, is adding "in the cloud" detection for parts of their service. AV-Test says that the latest available AV updates were from July 1, although that doesn't seem to have mattered much.
As with the other products, they tested against the 05/2009 WildList and select malware from older releases for a total of 3,194 samples that are confirmed malicious and widespread, and tested these both on-access and with the on-demand scanner. Norton 2010 found and removed all of these easily. They tested NAV2010 on XP with a larger set of about 680,000 samples. It detected 99.5% of these and registered no false positives.
They tested behavior-based detected using very new samples. Norton found 80% of these, which AV-Test calls an excellent result.
Tests of detection and cleaning of an already-infected PC proceeded well, removing all components, including registry keys, which many programs leave behind. System performance was also good.
AV-Test only tested the classic anti-malware functions described above. Norton Internet Security does much more, but they have not yet tested the newer functions. The test methodology used may be found here.
Symantec products have a history of performing well on AV-Test testing, which speaks well of them.
According to security company Sophos the web site of the British Communist Party has been compromised and is serving malware.
