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Latest test results as of January 2021 Malware detection rates
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The latter's malware-detection engine may be better tuned. The tables were turned in the July-October 2020 tests, in which Kaspersky averaged 99.7% detection to Norton's 99.5%īut Norton got a total of 72 false positives over the course of 2020, while Kaspersky had just two. Norton detected an average of 100% of malware from February through May 2020, ahead of Kaspersky's 99.9%. The two brands jockeyed for the lead in evaluations run by Austrian lab AV-Comparatives (opens in new tab) in 2020. (Norton's false-positive rate has been going down.)
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Only Kaspersky matched those numbers (and broke its winning streak in the same month), although Kaspersky's malware engine was arguably better "tuned" as it picked up only eight false-positive detections over that three-year period compared with Norton's 35. Norton detected every instance of known "widespread" malware in every monthly evaluation conducted by German lab AV-Test (opens in new tab) from January 2017 through December 2020. Its otherwise perfect winning streak against previously unseen "zero-day" malware was marred by a single miss in April 2020, when it got a 99.5% detection rate.
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