www.matousec.com - News

Hosting downtime

2012-04-10T10:00:00Z

Our web server hosting is facing problems in these days. All our projects including matousec.com and nmap-online.com can be temporarily unavailable. We are trying to solve this situation with our hoster's support, but we are also considering leaving our current hoster because of these problems. We apologize to all our visitors for any inconvenience and hope to provide fully accessible services soon again.

64-bits are uneasy to protect for many

2012-02-17T05:40:40Z

Sixteen products have been tested in Proactive Security Challenge 64 so far, so there are still many top products that are missing in the results, but it seems that the message we get is simple – security vendors find it hard to protect 64-bit Windows machines. Compared to the 32-bit platform, the results of the tested products are much worse. Yes, the overall difficulty of Proactive Security Challenge 64 is higher but that would justify only minor differences in results.

The only product that confirmed its quality on 64-bit platform so far is Comodo Internet Security Premium 5.9. In Proactive Security Challenge it reached the perfect 100% score, its result in Proactive Security Challenge 64 is just 6 % lower, which is reasonable and still an excellent result. Other products, however, lose tens of percents in the score. They fail even the techniques that they passed in the 32-bit testing and that can be protected with the very same code on both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. This is quite disturbing.

We hope to find more products that will succeed on 64-bit platform during the upcoming tests.

Proactive Security Challenge 64

2011-12-01T11:26:14Z

Proactive Security Challenge 64 starts and it is not just an update to another platform.

Security Software Testing Suite 64

2011-11-07T09:31:48Z

Recently Windows 7 became the number one operating system on desktops. There are many sources that present Windows 7 as the market leading system ahead of Windows XP. Other sources, however, still present Windows XP as the most used operating system on desktops. In any case, Windows 7 is more and more popular choice for desktop users and it is the right time for us to react to this evolution.

Recent challenge results

2011-06-20T16:00:00Z

In past weeks and months we have performed several tests of the latest versions of security suites and products in Proactive Security Challenge. Comodo Internet Security is still the only product that reached the perfect score against the latest set of tests. PC Tools Internet Security, Online Solutions Security Suite, Outpost Security Suite (both Pro and Free versions), Kaspersky Internet Security, Malware Defender and Privatefirewall are products that reached the Excellent level of protection — i.e. their final score is over 90 %. Well done to their vendors, it is not easy to get on this level.

Recently, we have started our work on the new testing suite for the challenge. This will be another big step for us but there is a lot to do and the whole process can take several months. Before the new suite is ready, we will keep testing the products with the current version of the suite.

PC Tools jumps to second place

2011-01-25T10:47:40Z

PC Tools Internet Security replaces PC Tools Firewall Plus in our challenge. PC Tools Internet Security 2011 has been tested and reached the Excellent level of protection in today's testing. With 99 % it is on the second place in our results table. Good job! The complete results are available on Proactive Security Challenge pages.

Free Outpost reached excellent results

2010-12-21T13:00:00Z

It has been a while but the free version of Outpost is back on top. We have tested the very new Outpost Security Suite Free, which replaces the older Outpost Firewall Free, and its results belong among the best we have seen in Proactive Security Challenge. Congratulations!

Proactive Security Challenge vs. real malware

2010-11-01T09:00:00Z

Proactive Security Challenge is a project devoted mostly to testing abilities of security software to protect against actions of malware. Currently, Proactive Security Challenge consists of 148 different tests. Sometimes we hear people arguing that the techniques used in our tests do not correspond with techniques used by the real malware. In order to find out how much Proactive Security Challenge reflects the real world of malware, we have performed the following research.

We have collected a set of 20 malware samples that were not detected by two popular anti-virus engines. This means that downloading these samples to the computer and executing them would be possible even with a fully updated anti-virus installed. Then we have run the samples and analyzed the techniques they used. The results are as follows.