Trend Micro led the group with 100% detection, but at a cost of 63 false positives compared to ESET's one. In four rounds from July to October 2020, ESET blocked an average of 99.3% of 'real-world' online malware, a mix of widespread and zero-day threats.

That wasn't the case with Austrian lab AV-Comparatives (opens in new tab), whose tests make it hard to get a perfect score without racking up lots of false positives. Most of the other paid antivirus products we review also had perfect AV-TEST scores in recent tests. Both sets of evaluations improved on ESET's scores in some earlier 2020 rounds, in which ESET failed to catch all zero-day malware. It registered no erroneous false positives during the test period.ĮSET did nearly as well in the September-October round of tests, again catching all malware while registering two false positives. Results from the German AV-TEST (opens in new tab) lab in November and December 2020 showed that the ESET scanner detected 100% of both known, widespread malware and brand-new 'zero-day' threats. Latest test results as of January 2021 Malware detection rates The improved Ransomware Shield uses heuristic monitoring to uncover threats, such as unwanted programs hidden in the system Registry.ĮSET is one of the first security programs to look for threats within the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) repository, which stores the system's metadata and definitions that the operating system and apps use to function. ESET distributes new malware signatures and other updates to its 110 million users as needed.Īll three ESET security suites have dedicated anti-phishing defenses, block script-based attacks and protect the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) start-up code. New potential threats are uploaded to the company's Live Grid cloud lab where machine learning techniques dissect the software. In addition to conventional comparisons of suspect files to a database of known threats, ESET's malware engine continually monitors the behavior of key system activities for the signs of an infection. Linux systems need to have Debian, Fedora, Open SUSE, Red Hat or Ubuntu distributions and Android devices require version 4.1 or newer. The ESET applications work with Windows 7 (with Service Pack 1), 8.1 and 10, plus Macs running macOS 10.12 (Sierra) through 11 (Big Sur). It does, however, lower the price if you buy two or three years of protection at once. Unlike its peers, ESET does not discount the first year of coverage for any of its antivirus suites.

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