Kaspersky Lab announces that its flagship consumer product, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012, posted the highest score in two years of independent detection testing. The 99.3% detection rate in AV-Comparatives March 2012 tests helped the product to receive an “Advanced+” rating from the independent laboratory.

AV-Comparatives on-demand testing evaluates how effectively the regular scanning process detects malicious files stored on the hard drive. Although this method does not actually reflect real-life PC usage, it demonstrates how efficiently security software deals with a large number of malicious files. In this particular test, a collection of slightly less than 300,000 samples was used. The number of false positive detections when scanning a large database of legitimate applications was also taken into account.

Kaspersky Lab’s solution was up against 20 products from other security vendors. Cloud-based security systems were enabled wherever they were available. In the final analysis, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2012 delivered a detection rate of 99.3%, ahead of all rivals and significantly higher than its 98.3% score from a similar AV-Comparatives test in August 2011. The industry average result in this test was 73%.

The products were also tested against a large database of clean files. In this test Kaspersky Anti-Virus recorded just nine false positive detections, noticeably better than the figures for even the closest competitors. In addition, all nine false positives were rated “low prevalence” by AV-Comparatives – in reality only a few hundred users actually use this software.

Oleg Ishanov, Director of Anti-Malware Research, Kaspersky Lab, commented: “Although we regard on-demand detection tests as somewhat outdated, compared to more lifelike Real-World evaluations, they allow us to assess basic reactive protection technologies. In the most recent evaluation by AV-Comparatives our product showed both the best result and an on-going improvement. This means that in a real-life scenario, when static detection is supplemented with a wide range of other technologies like System Watcher, Firewall or URL filtering, our users enjoy maximum protection against all types of threats.”

A full report on the results of AV-Comparatives’ on-demand evaluation, conducted in March 2012, is available following this link: http://av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/ondret/avc_fd_mar2012_intl_en.pdf