Independent testing body AV-Test.org has released the results of a major comparative of suite products, with many vendors’ 2009 editions included in the results. The test covers a range of metrics, including detection rates over various types of malware including adware and spyware, false positive rates, scanning speed, proactive detection, and response times to outbreaks.

In terms of pure detection rates in on-demand scanning, a beta version of GDATA’s AVK 2009 topped the charts for both ‘malware’ (measured against 1,164,662 samples) and ‘ad- and spyware’ (94,291 samples), with Avira’s Premium Security Suite 2008 a close runner-up in the former category and F-Secure 2009 placing second in the latter. Secure Computing’s Webwasher gateway product, based on the Avira engine with some in-house heuristics, came third in both categories.

Other areas analysed were scored on a five-point scale from very good to very poor. ‘Proactive’ protection included scanning of files discovered after the freezing of products, and executing unrecognised malware to test behavioural protection. Products rating ‘good’ or better in every category include Avira’s premium suite (the popular free version has less complete spyware detection), AVK 2009, F-Secure’s 2009 suite, Symantec’s Norton I.S. 2009 (still in beta) and Sophos’s Security Suite 2.5. All products taking part in the test managed to achieve a ‘good’ or better in at least one category.

The test also included keeping a record of the number of updates released over a four-week period. Of course, these numbers on their own cannot be used to measure the quality of the products involved, but were recorded out of interest. The most interesting data to emerge from this measurement was that the 2009 version of Norton topped the table with an impressive 6,202 incremental micro-updates, issued several times per hour, while Kaspersky came a distant second with a mere 696. Half of the 34 products tested had fewer than 100, including those from McAfee (21) and Trend Micro (30).