AV TEST malware protection for android march 2012

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Over the past year, 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. Close to two thirds 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.

Mostly traditional anti-virus vendors are in the top range of the average family detection results (> 90%): Avast, Dr. Web, F-Secure, Ikarus and Kaspersky. Exceptions are Zoner and Lookout which make into the top 7 group. Using these products you don’t have to worry about your malware protection.

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 anyway. Again, there are only two products from specialized mobile security vendors: AegisLab and Super Security. All other products in this group come from vendors well known in the desktop security (AVG, Bitdefender, ESET, Norton/Symantec, QuickHeal, Trend Micro, Vipre/GFI and Webroot).

Bullguard, Comodo, G Data, McAfee, NetQin and Total Defense 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 fourth group (< 40%) doesn’t contain any traditional anti-virus vendor and include the products which also failed in our last report. We’ve reviewed six 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. Even in the on-access tests these products had no detections. So it is safe to assume that these products really don’t detect anything, but we still wanted to point out the possibility of a flaw in our testing methodology.

http://www.av-test.o.../tests/android/