Virus Bulletin is an independent testing organization
staffed by full time professional antivirus experts and is widely recognized
within the antivirus industry for its rigorous comparative tests focusing on
virus detection rates, scanning speed, and the generation of false positives.
Virus Bulletin's VB100% Award is the award every antivirus vendor strives
to win. To earn this award an antivirus product must detect all current In-the-Wild viruses and must not produce any false positives. (In-the-Wild viruses are real viruses that have been reported to the
Wildlist Organization by at least two independent reporters.)
ESET NOD32 is the
only antivirus program in the world that has never missed a single In-the-Wild
worm or virus in Virus Bulletin testing since May 1998. NOD32
Antivirus System has held the world record in Virus Bulletin Awards for more
than 10 years!
When it comes to
In-the-Wild virus detection, no one even comes close to ESET.
The table below is based on the number of times antivirus products have been tested on various operating systems by Virus Bulletin since May 1998, when NOD32 was first submitted for testing.
| Comprehensive Protection: | ESET |
Symantec |
McAfee |
Trend |
Kaspersky |
| VB100 Awards for Detection of All In-the-Wild Viruses in the VB Test Sets Without Any False-Alarms (virusbulletin.com, May 1998 - October 2009) | 58 |
51 |
41 |
16 |
48 |
| Advanced+ Awards Tests of Proactive and On-Demand Detection (AV-Comparatives.org, May 2005 - August 2009) Advanced+/Advanced/Standard | 16/2/0 |
8/5/5 |
3/12/3 |
0/0/3 |
11/4/3 |
| Missed In-the-Wild Viruses in Virus Bulletin Tests between May 1998 and August 2009 (virusbulletin.com) | |||||
| - On-Access - On-Demand |
0 0 |
31 4 |
71 72 |
73 69 |
35 15 |
| Proactive Detection: | |||||
| Proactive Protection by AV-Comparatives (May 2009) | 56% |
35%* |
25% |
No Data |
50% |
| Proactive Test by AV-Test.org on 1-Month Old Signatures (January 2008) | 68% |
26%* |
30% |
27% |
24% |
| Performance Advantages: | |||||
| Boot Time Overhead Percentage by AV-Comparatives (November 2008) | 12% |
26% |
70% |
No Data |
108% |
| File Access Lag Time (virusbulletin.com; August 2008) |
0.02 MB/s |
0.04 MB/s |
0.08 MB/s |
No Data |
0.04 MB/s |
| Commit Charge (Clean Systems, West Coast Labs; September 2008) |
100.63 MB |
186.3 MB |
157.93 MB |
No Data |
156.12 MB |
| Application Startup Time (Internet Explorer, West Coast Labs; September 2008) |
1.94 seconds |
3.1 seconds |
3.74 seconds |
No Data |
2.17 seconds |
| Boot Times (West Coast Labs; September 2008) |
157 seconds |
229 seconds |
187 seconds |
No Data |
168 seconds |
| ** Symantec Norton AV | |||||

Where
antivirus software is concerned, consistency is the key to successful
virus protection!
** Symantec is shown in second place, but it failed the three Virus Bulletin tests prior to NOD32 making its debut, which means Symantec's actual overall success ratio is substantially lower than shown in the charts.
NOD32's scanning times are considerably faster than Symantec's, despite the fact that NOD32 has a much smaller system footprint and uses far less system resources.