The results are in from the Antivirus Fight Club at LinuxWorld, and, as expected, Clam AntiVirus, an open source project, did quite well when measured against commercial products.The competition was much more involved than initially described to me by Dirk Morris, CTO of Untangle. There were three rounds in the fight. Each antivirus product faced three groups of viruses.

First they faced a set of five test viruses (harmless files used for testing antivirus technology) from the European Institute for Computer Antivirus Research (EICAR). The second set consisted of 12 “in the wild” viruses collected by Untangle. The third set consisted of 17 viruses submitted by the public.

Overall, Kaspersky performed the best of any AV product. It stopped 97% of the viruses thrown at it. Clam AntiVirus performed second-best, with an overall catch rate of 91.4%. In third place was Norton, Symantec’s consumer AV product, which had an overall success rate of 88.6%

The worst performers were SonicWall (54.3%), Hauri (45.7%), Fortinet (45.7%) and WatchGuard (2.9%).

In his summary of the Fight Club results, Morris wrote that he is “surprised by how poor [sic] many of these solutions are performing. … Our goal in this test was not to scare people, or even drive people away from some vendors. We simply want to encourage discussion. Tests like these need to be open and transparent

There are bound to be some skeptics about this test. As one reader commented, this sample size of viruses is somewhat small. Would it be useful to introduce a larger test set of viruses?

Also, for some reason Untangle left Trend Micro out of this competition. Perhaps if there is a rematch, it will be included.