AV-TEST compares Cylance against five signature-based antivirus software suites; Results show Cylance with more than 97 percent efficacy against unknown threats versus a 42 percent average by legacy AV vendors
Cylance, the company replacing antivirus with AI-powered prevention blocking everyday malware along with the most advanced cyber threats available, has announced the results of an AV-TEST study that measured the advanced threat-prevention capabilities of leading enterprise endpoint protection software. The testing methodology was developed to provide additive testing to the commodity antivirus protection tests currently produced by AV-TEST.
During the study, Cylance’s artificial intelligence-based product CylancePROTECT was tested against five legacy, signature-based endpoint security products from Kaspersky, McAfee, Sophos, Symantec and Trend Micro. The primary goal of the study was to measure the detection and prevention capabilities of traditional antivirus software against the next-generation approach of Cylance. The study measures each product’s individual performance against new and unknown malicious executables in both connected and disconnected environments.
“This is the first time we tested the ‘marketing claims’ of a next-gen vendor and results showed that the claims are indeed backed up by the technology,” said Maik Morgenstern, CTO and CEO of AV-TEST.
There were several real-life scenarios against which AV-TEST evaluated CylancePROTECT: systems that had delayed updates, false positives, simulated attacks and malware that had been distributed by websites. AV-TEST proved Cylance’s approach sets it apart from all industry competition when it comes to effectiveness in preventing malware from executing. In all test cases, CylancePROTECT showed extremely high prevention rates.
“This is one of the first times that a major security testing house has employed testing criteria that mimic the real world where truly unknown threats attack endpoints in both a connected and disconnected environment,” said Chad Skipper, VP of industry relations and product testing at Cylance. “We’re hoping that this test will show other testing organizations that any comparison that allows vendors to know which threats are being used in advance is not representative of the challenge that enterprises face every single day in protecting their systems, their employees and their customers. And though we are thrilled with the results of AV-TEST’s independent study, it doesn’t change our advice for every company in the world when thinking about deploying new security software – test for yourselves.”
CylancePROTECT’s performance in the AV-TEST comparison beat the average performance of legacy antivirus across every single test. Some of the findings include:
- Highest Efficacy Against All Environments – CylancePROTECT was more than twice as effective as the average AV software in preventing threats before execution, stopping more than 97 percent of the malware samples. The second best product only detected 67 percent with an average across the five AV products of 42 percent. Cylance fared even better against competing products in offline environments, where it was more than three times as effective as the average of the other products tested.
- No Updates = Performance Advantage – Unlike traditional AV offerings, Cylance requires no back-end updates giving it a real-world performance advantage. Some companies may not deploy updates regularly, and users are often using non-updated machines with outdated signature databases. All three of AV-TEST’s protection test cases showed that CylancePROTECT has a very reliable approach that works offline, without the need for regular updates, even before execution of the malware. It also shows the dependency of the other products on regular updates, cloud queries or dynamic behavioral detection.
- Best Protection Against Unknown Threats – The tests have shown that CylancePROTECT is able to detect and prevent unknown attacks, while the other vendors are still struggling to prevent new malware from executing.
For more detailed analysis of the test results, read this blog post from Cylance.
