SE Labs on Effective AV

In my previous (very brief) post I was mildly critical of AV-Test for publishing a comparative review of OS X Sierra products without much in the way of information about methodology. Of course, there are lots of tests that don’t describe their methodology well, if at all, but I tend to expect better of testers who are also AMTSO members, who in principle subscribe to the The same complaint can rarely, if ever, be made about Simon Edwards, who is not only an excellent tester, but frequently writes informed commentary about testing and other security topics.

For example, this article on the SE Labs blog on Can anti-malware be 100 per cent effective? goes some way to answering the question ‘How can testing be any use when they only use a tiny percentage of all the malware that’s out there?’ 🙂 Maybe not all the way there.

But there are links to some very thorough reports.

David Harley