The best antivirus software will keep your PC or Mac secure from online threats. Which expert testing reveals the best antivirus software. Webroot Secure. Anywhere Anti. Virus Review Rating. Many antivirus companies have dropped the idea of version updates, or yearly updates, opting instead to continually hone the products skills and slipstream in new features. Webroot Secure. Anywhere Anti. Virus has hardly changed visibly since my last review, but as an Editors Choice it merits a new review, comparing it with all the latest products. Its still a winner. Like Bitdefender and Kaspersky, Webroot charges just under 4. Best Antivirus For Window' title='Best Antivirus For Window' />Want to know what the best free antivirus package is Our guide shows you which free security package is best. But Webroot charges just 1. Norton doesnt have a multi license plan, and one license will run you 4. As for Mc. Afee Anti. Virus Plus, it looks like the most expensive, at 5. You can use your Webroot licenses to install antivirus on both PCs and Macs. Webroot Secure. Anywhere Antivirus for Mac hasnt changed since my review earlier this year. Feel free to read my review of the Mac product for details. The actual installation of this product takes hardly any time at all. However, the installer performs a raft of other tasks, checking each one off as it finishes. Among these are analyzing installed applications to reduce warnings and prompts, establishing a system baseline and optimizing performance for your unique system configuration. Cx License Key Activation Failed. It also runs an antivirus scan. Even with these added tasks, the process goes quickly. The green toned main window features a lighter panel that includes statistics about recent antimalware scans and a button to launch an immediate scan. Even if you never click that button, Webroot makes a full scan during installation and runs a scheduled scan every day. Another sizeable panel offers a link to view the products User Guide. A panel at the right manages access to the rest of this products significant feature collection. Absent Lab Results. Webroots malware detection system is very different from most competitors. It doesnt use the typical antivirus signature database, but rather works on metadata and behavior patterns. It also calculates a simple numeric hash for each file, and checks its online database to see if that file has already been identified as good, or as bad. After that simple test, it worries only about unknowns. When an unknown program launches, Webroot monitors it closely, noting its behaviors and journaling its actions. It suppresses actions that arent reversible, like sending data to an unknown server. And it transmits details about the programs behavior to Webroots servers for analysis. In some cases, the analysis algorithms kick the program to human malware experts for a deeper dive. If analysis determines that the file is malicious, the local Webroot app kills the process and rolls back its actions. Webroots local program is utterly tiny, because most of its intelligence is in the cloud. If you somehow introduce a new file to the system when its offline, the local heuristic detection system might identify it as malware. Otherwise, Webroot treats it as an unknown, and monitors its behavior. When the system regains its internet connection, the local app checks with the cloud. If the file turns out to be a known good or bad program, it treats it appropriately. If not, it just keeps monitoring until a verdict is reached. This detection style doesnt fit very well with standard antivirus tests, especially those just using static samples. Adaptive Active Phased Array Radars Seminar Report Pdf there. Even in a test that launches malware for observation, the researchers expect detection right away. As a result, Webroot simply doesnt participate in most independent lab testing. In the past, it did pass the difficult tests performed by MRG Effitas, and my contacts at the company tell me it will appear in that labs reports again. Excellent Malware Protection Scores. With nothing from the labs, my own hands on tests become more important. To get the ball rolling, I downloaded my current malware collection from Dropbox and extracted the files to a folder on the desktop. This file collection also includes a bunch of old PCMag utilitiesvalid files that are rarely in the wild. That ensures that an antivirus cant just decree that if a folder contains malware, all files in that folder are malicious. At this point, Webroot detected and eliminated 5. This represents all the samples whose hash a simple numeric fingerprint was already in Webroots cloud database. I maintain a second set of samples, modified by hand. Each modified edition has a different name from the original, and a different size, thanks to zeroes appended at the end. I also reached in to change some non executable bytes in each. Looking only at the tweaked files corresponding to ones whose original got whacked on sight by Webroot, I found that it missed about a quarter of them. Thats quite normal. This little test just checks the flexibility of signature based detection systems. Trend Micro missed 4. Kaspersky missed 4. I noticed something weird, though. Looking at the modified files corresponding to the ones Webroot did not eliminate on sight, I found that it wiped the modified versions of almost half. My Webroot contact explained. These hand modified never before seen files could not appear in the database, and their absence was a suspicious circumstance, suggesting the possibility of polymorphic malware. That possibility triggered an extra level of scrutiny. I proceeded to launch the surviving samples. After each detection, Webroot wanted to run a scan, which would be entirely appropriate in a real world detection situation. To save time, I had it wait until I had tried all the samples. It caught all of them either at launch or soon thereafter. I also installed all the valid PCMag utilities that I had mixed with the malware samples Webroot correctly left those alone. When I did permit it to run a full scan, it took about 1. It then ran another intensive scan, just to be sure. That scan finished in seven minutes. Next, I used my hand coded analysis tools to verify that there was no trace of any malware. Webroot, like Symantec Norton Anti. Virus Basic, detected 1. For scan speed comparison purposes, I tested again on a completely clean system. This scan, too, finished in seven minutes. Thats a bit longer than when I last tested Webroot, but still the fastest full scan among current products. Yes, Malwarebytes 3. Premium finished in 2. The current average is 4. Malware Protection Results Chart. It takes me a week or more to gather, select, and analyze a new collection of malware for testing. Those samples remain in use until I can go through the process again, so its no surprise that many of the files were already in Webroots database of hashes. My malicious URL blocking test, on the other hand, always uses the very latest files, from a feed supplied by MRG Effitas. These are typically no older than the previous day. I work down the list, launching each URL, discarding any that give an error message, or that dont point to an executable malware file. Looking at the valid ones, I note whether the antivirus prevents browser access to the dangerous page, eliminates the malware during or just after download, or does nothing. When Ive got 1. 00 data points, I figure thats enough. Webroots web protection kicked in to keep the browser from visiting 1. URLs, stating that visiting this page could subject you to danger. The real time antivirus eliminated another 7. Drivers Wireless Multimedia Keyboard 1.1 Microsoft. Thats better than the 8. Webroot managed when last tested, but others have done better. Norton tops the list, with 9. Trend Micro Antivirus Security is close behind with 9. Ransomware Protection.