Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012 Cures Ten out of Ten Malware-Infected Systems in Independent Testing

PETALING JAYA, January 13, 2012 - Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012 has received the highest grade possible – Advanced+ – in independent testing of how well an infected system is treated, conducted by the respected research laboratory AV-Comparatives in November 2011. The testing entailed analysis of the ability of antivirus-class products of different manufacturers – after having been installed on an already infected operating system – to delete the respective malicious code. Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012 successfully located and deleted all the malicious programs used separately in the testing.

The testing involved infecting an unprotected system running the Windows XP operating system with a single malicious program, the AV software then being installed on the system, followed by a full scan being performed. This process was repeated ten times for each AV, each time with a different widespread malicious program. The research laboratory’s specialists followed the recommendations of each AV program to the letter and, as necessary, rebooted the system or used the rescue disk (if such a disk came bundled with the AV). After each full scan the system was analyzed and assessed in detail, and the results were collated to form the overall awarded marks for each AV. In this analysis particular attention was paid to, among other things, the remaining presence of individual malicious components not deleted by the AV and able to cause system failure.

The results show that Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012 fully deleted all ten malicious programs and all their components. In nine of the ten instances no actions were required on behalf of the user; regarding the tenth, this was a Trojan program that fully blocked the system, and it was successfully deleted using the rescue disk. Of particular significance in this testing was the fact that it tested the ability of the AV to reverse changes made to the Windows registry. Without this ability being tested in addition to simply deleting Trojans, the latter may still cause loss of operability of the operating system. Noteworthy is the fact that only three out of the 18 tested AV programs were able to defeat the particular Trojan that amended the registry.

Commenting on the test results, Oleg Ishanov, Head of Infrastructure Development and Deputy Director of Anti-Malware Research at Kaspersky Lab, said: “Restoring an infected system is rightly considered to be one of the toughest tasks an anti-virus program has to deal with. In many cases not only does the malicious code need to be deleted, but also the altered system components need restoring. AV-Comparatives’ independent testing has once again shown how Kaspersky Lab products not only effectively prevent computers from becoming infected, but are also perfectly capable of fully curing already infected systems back to good health.”