The latest market share report covered not only antivirus vendor and product market share data but also took a closer look at the ways these products are used. The report also highlighted Gears' advanced ability to detect malware, PUAs and compromised devices. Let's take a look at some of the data.
Top Antivirus Companies
Avast
ranked as the top antivirus company for the first time in two years. Avast's lead was largely due to the decision to remove Windows Defender from the data, as this antivirus product is built into newer Windows systems and is not a comprehensive anti-malware application. The top antivirus product in the report was Microsoft Security Essentials, which almost tied with avast! Free Antivirus. Overall, Avast and Microsoft dominated the market with around triple the market share compared to the next competitors — Avira and AVG.
Users Reluctant to Run Full System Scans
We found it a bit alarming that only 8.7% of devices had run a full system scan in the last seven days. Users should not solely rely on real time protection (RTP) to keep their systems safe. As the nature of malware becomes more advanced and evasive techniques become more common, it's important that users take advantage of all aspects of their antivirus suite. Relying on a false sense of total security that real time protection can give, users may be reluctant to run a full system scan because it competes with system resources, or the AV may be unable to perform a scheduled scan on a hibernating computer. It is important to note that if this data were collected outside of Gears, the percent of devices that had recently performed a scan would probably be even lower. Gears devices are usually owned by mid-level to power users who are more proactive with device security compared to the general public.
Compared to full scans, surveyed Gears devices showed better performance in updating their antivirus definitions, with about 85% being up-to-date. The process for updating antivirus definitions should be seen as a quick and painless process that can easily be performed automatically by enabling real time protection. While devices performed much better in this category, a large percentage of them are still not up-to-date.
Antivirus Products are Overlooking Some Threats
The Compromised Devices section of the report revealed a small, but significant number of devices that had potential threats that couldn't be remediated by their installed antivirus products. This type of threat occurs when files are repeatedly detected by the antivirus engine and continue after efforts have been made to remove or remediate the threat. Fortunately, Gears has two very powerful methods to detect unremediated threats that would have been missed by the typical user relying on a single antivirus product for protection.
No single antivirus product can detect 100% of malware 100% of the time. Gears addresses this issue by harnessing the power of Metascan Online, which scans for threats with more than 40 antivirus products at the same time. This feature allows Gears to detect any viruses, Trojans, or potentially unwanted applications (PUAs) missed by an installed antivirus product. We have all seen how one piece of undetected malware left on a device can breach an entire network.
Our data sample showed that 3.3% of devices harbored a potential threat or PUA that was detected by Gears (and probably missed by the device's installed antivirus). PUAs cover a gray area in the definition of malware. Though they are usually more of a nuisance than they are harmful, they have the potential to become dangerous if they are used by hackers as an entry point in order to gain access to a system.
Many antivirus products can be tricked by self-preserving malware that reproduces itself after being quarantined and cannot be completely removed from the system. If the antivirus product runs a daily scan, the threat will be detected and quarantined each day, only to return and further compromise the system. Fortunately, Gears has a way to prevent this type of infection by alerting the program administrator if the same malware is detected by the installed antivirus product more than a specified number of times. In our data sample, a self-preserving threat was detected 5 or more times on 0.7% of devices. This statistic may not seem that concerning, but in a large organization with 1,000 devices, 70 of them would have a self-preserving threat on their system.
Conclusion
New threats emerge daily, so it is troubling that only 8.7% of of devices in the study were running full system scans within the last seven days. Without running regular scans, a device's risk of exposure to threats becomes much greater.
Only 0.7% of surveyed devices had unremediated threats, but when looking at this statistic as company-wide issue, these threats can become a problem. Unremediated threats indicate that certain issues are not being fully treated by the antivirus product. It is important for users to be able to identify issues that may become threats, such as PUAs, so that they can be removed from the device, reducing the risk of an attack or data breach.
To get more details about any of the above information, please read the full report.
