The Best Antivirus for 2015

 These days, there’s no question that keeping your computer safe from malware and other threats should be a top priority. We’ve tested more than 30 premium AV packages to help you choose the one that’s right to protect your PC.

If you don’t install antivirus software, you risk having your PC taken over by ransomware or losing personal data to a sneaky Trojan. But which antivirus should you use? We’ll help you decide.

We call these utilities “antivirus,” but in fact they protect against a huge range of malicious programs, including ransomware, spyware, adware, keyloggers, rootkits, Trojans, and more. Lucky for us, there’s also a huge range of products designed to fight these nasties. PCMag has reviewed over 30 different commercial antivirus utilities, and that’s not even counting free antivirus tools. Ten of the for-pay versions proved effective enough to earn an excellent four stars or better. Another eleven earned at least three stars.

Almost all of these products are traditional, full-scale antivirus tools, with the ability to scan files for malware on access, on demand, or on schedule. A couple are outliers, tools meant to enhance the protection of a traditional antivirus. As for just relying on the antivirus built into Windows 8.x, that’s not such a good idea. According to both our tests and independent lab tests, Windows Defender won’t keep you safe.

Listen to the Labs
I take the results reported by independent antivirus testing labs very seriously. The simple fact that a particular vendor’s product shows up in the results is a vote of confidence, of sorts. It means the lab considered the product significant, and the vendor felt the cost of testing was worthwhile. Of course, getting good scores in the tests is also important.

Note, though, that good scores must be obtained honestly, or else there’s no point in testing. Recently, several prominent labs revealed that one vendor haddeliberately weakened protection to get a better performance score. Anothersupplied a different version for testing than ordinary users could download. PCMag doesn’t condone any kind of chicanery aimed solely at raising test scores.

I follow six labs that regularly release detailed reports: West Coast Labs, Virus Bulletin, ICSA Labs, Dennis Technology Labs, AV-Test Institute, and AV-Comparatives. Tests by the first three are based on simple threat-recognition, while the last three attempt to simulate real-world malware-attack scenarios. I’ve devised a system for aggregating their results to yield a rating from 0 to 5. As you can see, none of these products earned an aggregate lab score less than 4.

Hands-On Antivirus Testing
I also subject every product to my own hands-on test of malware blocking, in part to get a feeling for how the product works. Depending on how thoroughly the product prevents malware installation, it can earn up to 10 points for malware blocking.

Some products earn absolutely stellar ratings from the independent labs, yet don’t fare as well in my hands-on tests. In such cases, I defer to the labs, as they bring significantly greater resources to their testing.

Multi-Layered Antivirus Protection
Antivirus products distinguish themselves by going beyond the basics of on-demand scanning and real-time protection. Some rate URLs that you visit or that show up in search results, using a red-yellow-green color coding system. Some actively block processes on your system from connecting with known malware-hosting URLs, or with fraudulent (phishing) pages.

Software has flaws, and sometimes those flaws affect your security. Prudent users keep Windows and all programs patched, fixing those flaws as soon as possible. The vulnerability scan offered by some antivirus products can verify that all necessary patches are present, and even apply any that are missing.

You expect an antivirus to identify and eliminate bad programs, and to leave good programs alone. What about unknowns, programs it can’t identify as good or bad? Behavior-based detection can, in theory, protect you against malware that’s so new researchers have never encountered it. However, this isn’t always an unmixed blessing. It’s not uncommon for behavioral detection systems to flag many innocuous behaviors performed by legitimate programs.

Whitelisting is another approach to the problem of unknown programs. A whitelist-based security system only allows known good programs to run. Unknowns are banned. This mode doesn’t suit all situations, but it can be useful. Sandboxing lets unknown programs run, but isolates them from full access to your system, so they can’t do permanent harm. These various added layers serve to enhance your protection against malware.

Bonus Features
Firewall protection and spam filtering aren’t common antivirus features, but some of our top products include them as bonus features. In fact, some of these antivirus products are more feature-packed than certain products sold as security suites.

Among the other bonus features you’ll find are: secure browser for financial transactions; secure deletion of sensitive files; wiping traces of computer and browsing history; credit monitoring; virtual keyboard to foil keyloggers; and more. And of course I’ve already mentioned sandboxing, vulnerability scanning, and application whitelisting.

What’s Best?
We’ve named not one but three Editors’ Choice products for premium antivirus protection, Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2015, Kaspersky Anti-Virus (2015), and Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus (2015). Each shines in its own way. Kaspersky floats at the top in all the independent lab tests. Bitdefender gets great lab scores too, and it’s wonderfully unobtrusive. Webroot’s unusual detection technique doesn’t lend itself to most lab testing, but it’s absolutely the tiniest antivirus around. For that matter, the rest of the products featured here are quite good, and some have unusually rich feature sets. Read the reviews for full details, then make your choice.

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