The AV Comparatives Leaderboard Is Not As Crowded As It Seems

Three things matter the most when defending an organization against cyber threats: effectiveness, accuracy, and consistency. While effectiveness is well understood and refers to the overall ability of a security solution to detect and block threats, accuracy and consistency are not so easy to grasp.  

Accuracy translates into the effort asked from the security team to review and process security alerts, including false alarms. The less accurate a solution, the more security operations cost there is for the organization.  

Consistency is effectiveness delivered over time. An attack must only succeed once to deliver a lot of harm. 

What stories do (recent) independent tests from AV Comparatives tell us?

The latest results published by AV-Comparatives covering August to November 2021 shows a "snapshot" of the effectiveness for tested solutions in that time period. With the highest protection level of 99.9% in the Real-world Protection Test and 99.8% in the Malware Protection Tests, Bitdefender – once again – demonstrated superior effectiveness in its security stack.

Bitdefender's exceptional performance is reinforced by combining its leading protection scores with ZERO false alarms in both tests! With increasing pressure and workload on security operations teams, this is absolutely a critical difference. Most vendors had multiple false alarms with one as high as 19 that IT and security teams using their product would have needed to process.  

A solution that generates no false alarms means reduced operational overhead - allowing security teams to focus on other more strategic activities, like enhancing the organization's overall security posture and resilience in addition to focusing more time on real alarms! 

What about consistency?

Understanding how a product behaves over the long term is paramount. The results in previous AV-Comparatives (and other similar real-world industry tests) reveal how consistent a solution is for defending an organization over time. Let's take the previous March-June AV-Comparatives results. Bitdefender was the absolute leader again: 99.9% in the Real-World Protection Test and 100% effective in the Malware Protection Test. False Positive rate was also excellent: respectively three and zero False Alarms! No solution scored so high and had fewer false alarms. In fact, one solution provider had 91 total false alarms. 

Looking further back, Bitdefender's security products and solutions have received 30 AV-Comparatives awards in 2020 and 2021 alone, and this exceptional track record has been consistent for many years before that. 

The leadership board

Every solution that delivers a great result in an industry test should be appreciated. Cyber threats are evolving at an incredible pace, and the effort required to build an effective security solution is high. Getting a place on the industry tests leaderboard is even more challenging. Few cybersecurity solutions proved the accuracy and consistency needed to stay at the top and maintain a true leadership position.  

Bitdefender is committed to participating in industry tests like AV-Comparative, AV-Test and the MITRE Engenuity Evaluations to provide customers with accurate, relevant, objective data to enable a fact-based choice when selecting the best-performing security solution.