The AV-TEST Institute, an independent anti-virus research
provider, tested the different virus scanners for Android
and evaluated their detection performance.
The popularity of the Android system has led to a huge
increase in the distribution of Android malware. This
malware is mainly distributed in markets operated by
third parties, but even the Google Android Market cannot
guarantee that all of its listed applications do not
contain any threats. Users should no longer blindly trust
all apps. A large range of protection programmes that can
help to identify dangerous apps and remove them from a
user's device are now available.
AV-TEST has inspected 41 different virus scanners for Android with regard to their detection performance. According to the report, about half of these scanners are
not yet suitable for use as reliable products and identify less than 65% of the 618 types of malware tested. The mobile versions of well-known desktop
products were mostly evaluated as good or very good.
The best products in AV-Test's report (with detection rates of 90% and higher) come from the following top 10 companies, in alphabetic order: Avast, Dr. Web, F-Secure,
Ikarus, Kaspersky, Lookout, McAfee, MYAndroid Protection/MYMobile Security, NQ Mobile/NetQin as well as Zoner. "When using these products you don't have to worry
about your malware protection," AV-Test said.
Products with a detection rate between 90% and 65% are
still very good and could move to the top range depending
on changes to the tested malware set. Some of these
products just miss one or two malware families, which
might be not prevalent in certain environments. The
following 13 products, in alphabetic order, fall in this
category: AegisLab, AVG Mobilation, Bitdefender,
BullGuard, Comodo, ESET, Norton/Symantec, QuickHeal,
Super Security, Total Defense, Trend Micro, Vipre/GFI as
well as Webroot.
BluePoint, G Data and Kinetoo are in the third range (40
- 65%). "These vendors may still not have a sufficient
infrastructure to collect a broad range of malware or
they focus on a local market. They provide reliable
malware protection against a few families, but have
trouble with some others. It can be expected that these
products will improve once they broaden their sample
acquiring," the research found.
The fourth group (< 40%) doesn't contain any traditional
anti-virus vendor and include the products which also
performed below average in the last test. AV-Test
reviewed two more products which are listed in the last
category. "We could not clearly determine whether they
scanned the malware set correctly or not or whether they
are able to detect anything at all. This means that we
haven't seen any detection, neither on our widely known
samples nor on the EICAR test file," AV-Test added.
You can find the detailed test report
here.