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PSC Awards, Malware Defender receives first one (2010/03/04 18:29)
We are introducing Proactive Security Challenge Awards. Every product tested against the full set of 148 tests that reaches at least Very good protection level will receive a Proactive Security Challenge Award. The vendor of such a product may request for the PSC Award logo that can be placed on the product's web page or printed on its box.
We have also retested two products in Proactive Security Challenge, namely Malware Defender and McAfee Internet Security. Malware Defender has become the first product that received Proactive Security Challenge Award. Check out the latest results!
New results (2010/02/21 13:25)
After quite a long pause we are back again with new results. We have started the new era of Proactive Security Challenge with 148 tests, which cover many areas of Windows security that were not examined before.
In last few days we have tested Privatefirewall, Norton Internet Security, ZoneAlarm Extreme Security and avast! Internet Security. If you are interested, check out the results!
Another Proactive Security Challenge milestone – it now contains 148 tests (2010/01/04 10:30)
We have implemented several major changes in our Proactive Security Challenge:
1) 64 new tests have been implemented to SSTS. The main focus was to cover files and folders protection, registry keys and values protection and control of system autorun entries. Several tests of other kind were implemented too. A functionality of a few tests has been changed.
2) Scoring have changed in case of many tests. There are currently no 5%, 10% or 50% penalties, every failure leads to score of 0% for the given test. This affects many termination tests, SSS, SSS2, SSS3, Driver Verifier, BSODhook and ShadowHook tests.
3) The vendors now have a right of only one free testing request per six months for all their products, previously they had two such requests for every product. This change is enforced by the extensive amount of the new tests.
4) SSTS now contains the new Configurator tool. This tool is handy for creating the configuration files, especially for the settings required by the new tests related to file and registry protection.
The vendors are now given five weeks to review their products' protections. The tests with the new version of the suite and new rules will start after that.
The further development will focus on implementing new testing suite for Windows 7 on 64-bit platform.
Proactive Security Challenge news, 100% for PC Tools (2009/12/11 18:07)
After quite a long time we have published new results in Proactive Security Challenge. This time for two latest versions of PC Tools Firewall Plus and Online Armor Premium. The latest version of PC Tools Firewall Plus reached the perfect result and now shares the first position in our challenge with Comodo Internet Security. Online Armor is still close to this with 99%.
As mentioned previously, we are working on a new set of tests that will raise the bar again and cover areas of Windows OS security that are not covered by our tests yet. This is why there are few new results published in these days. We thank you for your patience. We believe the new tests will be worth it.
New Comodo scored perfectly! (2009/10/10 14:50)
Per its vendor's request, we have tested the latest version of Comodo Internet Security in Proactive Security Challenge. As the first product, Comodo Internet Security reached the perfect score against all 84 tests in the testing suite. Congratulations!
The great results of the challenge leading products in the last tests force us to implement new tests to our testing suite. We are going to cover even more areas of Windows security with many new tests in the following months in order to raise the bar just a bit again.
PC Tools jumps to top (2009/09/09 14:21)
Our latest tests revealed great improvements in PC Tools Firewall Plus, which is now on the shared first place together with Online Armor Personal Firewall. Good job PC Tools!
Summary of June tests (2009/06/29 12:06)
Two updates have been in Proactive Security Challenge in June, during which we retested eight products, namely:
- Avira Premium Security Suite 9.0.0.367
- Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 9.0.0.459
- Lavasoft Personal Firewall 3.0.2293.8822
- Malware Defender 2.2.2
- Online Armor Personal Firewall 3.5.0.14 Free
- Outpost Security Suite Pro 2009 6.5.4.2525.381.0687
- Panda Internet Security 2010 15.00.00
- Rising Internet Security 2009 21.41.21
Excellent results have been achieved by Kaspersky Internet Security, Online Armor Personal Firewall and Outpost Security Suite Pro. Close to excellent results was Malware Defender. All others failed completely except for Lavasoft Personal Firewall that finished in the middle of the scoring table. Visit Proactive Security Challenge results for more information.
Migration to IE8 (2009/05/20 14:27)
Starting next time, Proactive Security Challenge testing will be performed with Internet Explorer 8 set as the default browser. This update required Breakout1 test to be updated, all other tests should work without a change. Kill6 has been improved to be able to use alternative methods to obtain a process handle.
Online Armor first, free Outpost also great (2009/05/02 10:34)
Recently, Agnitum Ltd. released a new free version of Outpost Firewall and also Tall Emu Pty Ltd released a new version of their Online Armor Personal Firewall. A great opportunity for Proactive Security Challenge testing.
We have also included the latest version of Privatefirewall and three products that have not been tested in our challenge before. These were CA Internet Security Suite Plus, eConceal Pro for Windows and ThreatFire Free. How did they score? See the results of Proactive Security Challenge.
Firewall Challenge renamed to Proactive Security Challenge (2009/04/23 16:27)
Firewall Challenge has been renamed to Proactive Security Challenge. There were several reasons why we decided to rename this project. We wanted to stress out the fact that this project always focused on security products that implement application-based security model and behavior blocking features – i.e. most of Internet security suites, HIPS, personal firewalls and behavior blockers on the market. We want to mitigate misunderstanding and criticism of our project by eliminating the word firewall from its name and web pages. You can read what kind of products do we test in Proactive Security Challenge in the project's FAQ. We have also modified the content of the projects web pages so that the focus and goals of the project should be clear.
The challenge will continue very soon.