Kaspersky Anti-Virus (2014)

Pros Advanced disinfection at install handles active malware. Excellent ratings from independent labs. Very good score in hands-on malware removal test. Accurate phishing protection. Useful bonus tools.

Cons Some difficulty installing on malware-infested systems. Good-not-great results in hands-on malware blocking test. Bottom Line The independent testing labs give top marks to Kaspersky Anti-Virus (2014). It didn't fare quite as well in my own hands-on tests, but it's definitely a good choice.

By Neil J. Rubenking

It's not even September yet, and I've already encountered one antivirus with "2014" in its name and another with an implied 2014. Kaspersky doesn't use year or version numbers anymore; I'll call their latest product Kaspersky Anti-Virus (2014) to distinguish it from last year's version. In addition to effective antivirus protection, it offers a number of useful bonus features.

G Data AntiVirus 2014 is the product that's declared itself ready for the new year. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus (2014) doesn't actually use a year number, but it's the latest version. Symantec has also eliminated version and year numbers; their new product line will show up in early September.

Installation Challenges
Kaspersky installed without incident on eight of my twelve malware-infested test systems. On seven of those systems, it reported active malware immediately after installation and asked permission to perform an advanced disinfection, followed by a reboot. In a couple of cases it requested another advanced disinfection afterward. This made for a lengthy installation process, but on several systems a later full scan found nothing, meaning that the initial disinfection did the entire cleanup job.

The WindowsUnlocker component of Kaspersky's Rescue Disc foiled a ransomware threat that initially prevented installing the antivirus. On another system, the installer totally failed. On advice from tech support I employed a number of specialized tools and ran the Rescue Disc. Advice from tech support fixed collateral damage caused by the Rescue Disc; eventually I managed a full scan.

Kaspersky installed fine on one system but every time it launched, the process was immediately terminated by malware. Solving this required a number of tools, including a custom script supplied by tech support, but eventually I got the product installed and working.

I did run into some issues getting Kaspersky installed, granted, but all of the problems were solved by the Rescue Disc and other ancillary Kaspersky tools. On that basis, Kaspersky gets four stars for installation experience.

Good Malware Cleanup
Once I completed all of the installations I ran a full scan on each system and tallied up the results. I was a little apprehensive, because I had tested Kaspersky PURE 3.0 Total Security using the same malware collection a few months ago. I wondered if information gathered during that earlier test would give the antivirus an unfair advantage.

I needn't have worried. The antivirus handled almost 90 percent of the malware samples exactly the same way the suite had, right down to the percentage of non-executable traces remaining. For those where the two products produced different results, sometimes one was better, sometimes the other. Why any difference? Most likely it's because I applied different ancillary cleanup tools in the process of getting the two products installed.

Kaspersky detected 81 percent of the samples, the same as Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition (2014) and better than the 78 percent detected by Kaspersky PURE. It scored 6.1 points for malware removal, a fraction above Kaspersky PURE and a fraction below Bitdefender Free.

Best among products tested with this same malware collection was Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, with 83 percent detection and 6.6 points. The unusual cleanup-only Jumpshot tool detected more, 86 percent of the samples, but scored just 6.5 points.

For a full explanation of how I run this test see How We Test Malware Removal.

Kaspersky Anti-Virus (2014) malware removal chart

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