A recent independent study from AV-Test.org revealed that most anti-malware solutions out there does not have sufficient malware protection for Android.
Among the threats for Android include Phishing- and Banking-Trojans, Spyware, Bots, Root Exploits, SMS Fraud, Premium Dialers, Fake Installers and Download-Trojans apps.
AV-Test inspected 41 different Android anti-malware solutions against 618 types of malware from 20 different malware ‘families’. However only Kaspersky Mobile Security and McAfee Mobile Security scored the highest.
The evaluation by AV-Test.org conducted in early 2012, had given the ‘green light’ to just seven products, while 18 solutions detected less than 40% of malware samples and six of them failed to spot a single piece of rogue code.
The top seven products with the best detection rates are Avast(free), Dr. Web(free), F-Secure, Ikarus, Kaspersky(free), Lookout, McAfee, MYAndroid Protection, NQ Mobile and Zoner. AV-Test said that users of products made by these companies can be assured that they are protected against malware.
In a statement, Victor Dronov, Senior Product Manager, Kaspersky Lab, commented: “Recently the number of mobile malware samples in our database has exceeded 10 thousand. That is why we believe it’s essential to have a security solution on your Android smartphone. We are pleased with the results of independent testing by AV-Test.org – they confirm the efficiency of our product as a whole, and endorse our recently introduced combination of traditional and cloud-based security technologies in particular. These results also clearly demonstrate that our product is a market leader, among both free and paid-for products.”
The results of the testing show that even including paid products makes little difference to the landscape compared to the earlier testing: many free and paid-for products from little-known and popular vendors appear to be useless in real life, missing a large number of malware samples. Alarmingly, six programs did not detect any malicious apps at all.
The full report can be downloaded below.
[Report]– AV-Test
