You may have read in the news recently about some reports suggesting antivirus products are not secure. I’d like to address this as I feel this is actually misleading for consumers.
Obviously I work at a company which offers antivirus free and subscription products for desktop and mobile devices. But that means I understand how antivirus works, why it works that way and why this is effective.
The objective of antivirus is to protect customers from known threats and to quickly adapt for new threats that no-one can know about in advance, and to issue fixes to anyone finding their device has been infected. Antivirus can never protect against every threat because new ones are being created all the time and that’s the reality of the environment.
AVG’s protection products scan for threats on many levels – signature-based detection is where we can recognize the identity of the threat, and behavioural-based detection is where something on the device or on the Internet acts differently to how it should. AVG products protect customers in many different ways and at differing points where malware may infect their machine, for example, detecting a vulnerability sometimes rather than an actual exploit.
Working labs, certification organizations and people that consider themselves white hat testers are nothing new to us. All antivirus companies continually change and morph their products to detect manipulative methods used by malware writers.
We encourage all testers of our products to share their methodology in line with industry standards set out by AMTSO. I myself sit on the AMTSO management team and the structure we put in place around ensuring accurate, useful testing is to my mind necessary and a responsible industry approach.
AVG AntiVirus software detects millions of threats in our user base every day and we continue to develop technologies that address these threats to help our customers. You can find on our AVG Threat Labs site the latest information about the real world threats that have prevalence in the market and pose a real risk to users. If you think of this in the context of driving a car, you wear a seatbelt so it’s always ready to protect you if and when you need it.
So I want to put your mind at ease – if you use AVG’s AntiVirus products, we’re helping to keep you safe online. Our products are tested and verified by independent experts every month who use prevalent and real world malware. Our results in these tests can be viewed online, for example, at AV-Test.
If you have any concerns, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can also follow me on Twitter on @tonyatavg