As you can see, none of these products earned an aggregate lab score less than 4. I’ve devised a system for aggregating their results to yield a rating from 0 to 5. Tests by the first three are based on simple threat-recognition, while the last three attempt to simulate real-world malware-attack scenarios. I follow six labs that regularly release detailed reports: West Coast Labs, Virus Bulletin, ICSA Labs, Dennis Technology Labs, AV-Test Institute, and AV-Comparatives. PCMag doesn’t condone any kind of chicanery aimed solely at raising test scores. Another supplied a different version for testing than ordinary users could download. Recently, several prominent labs revealed that one vendor had deliberately weakened protection to get a better performance score.

Note, though, that good scores must be obtained honestly, or else there’s no point in testing. Of course, getting good scores in the tests is also important. It means the lab considered the product significant, and the vendor felt the cost of testing was worthwhile. The simple fact that a particular vendor’s product shows up in the results is a vote of confidence, of sorts.

I take the results reported by independent antivirus testing labs very seriously.

According to both our tests and independent lab tests, Windows Defender won’t keep you safe. As for just relying on the antivirus built into Windows 8.x, that’s not such a good idea. A couple are outliers, tools meant to enhance the protection of a traditional antivirus. Almost all of these products are traditional, full-scale antivirus tools, with the ability to scan files for malware on access, on demand, or on schedule.

The best antivirus 2015