First published: 30th June 2007
F-Secure protection technologies have scored high in two recent independent tests. Reliability of protection is the core value that F-Secure solutions provide to their users, and these tests substantiate the ability of F-Secure solutions to live up to this ambition.
One of today's most challenging IT security problems are so called zero-day attacks (new unknown malware for which no signature detection exists).
Recently AV-comparatives tested F-Secure's behavior-based detection technology F-Secure DeepGuard for its ability to stop malware that is not found with traditional signature based virus scanning. F-Secure DeepGuard passed the test winning the "Proactive Protection Award" and was able to block all malware used for the test, proving that DeepGuard is able to do an excellent job of identifying and stopping previously unknown "zero-day" threats. The F-Secure DeepGuard technology is based on pervasive monitoring of program behavior during execution, a method which significantly improves the overall level of protection compared to traditional signature based file analysis. This approach enables the security solution to see beneath the surface of the system to detect and stop threats that were designed to pass all traditional defenses unnoticed.
"Our test consisted of new virus samples for which no signatures yet exist. The fact that F-Secure could stop them all with its DeepGuard technology proves that such a behavior-based analysis of malware during run-time can be quite effective in stopping zero-day threats", says Andreas Clementi, project manager at the AV-Comparatives test laboratory.
Despite the importance of behavior-based protection, a core capability of any antivirus solution is the ability to detect malware that is known and can be identified with traditional signature based virus scanning. A test done by AV-Test.org in May 2007 included over 600.000 malware samples. F-Secure achieved a very high detection rate, and was able to detect 978 samples more than Symantec, 42,226 samples that Trend Micro did not detect, and 64,653 samples more than McAfee. F-Secure also detected 105,391 samples that Microsoft's solution missed.
"F-Secure is a challenger in the global antivirus market, and as such we need to perform better than our big competitors. Our systematic focus on innovative protection technology development and state-of-the-art research coupled with highly automated proprietary analysis systems is producing results that our customers see as a very highly reliable protection of their PC's and smartphones" says Pirkka Palomäki, Senior Vice President of Research and Development at F-Secure.