I may be wrong, but I can't find any info as to their sponsors other than universities and volunteer researchers.
And I'm not sure how that addresses what I said about Defender being borderline useless, because they come up short across most tests from what I remember.
Unless it has drastically improved in the last year.
I think AV Comparatives are independent -- at least they were when I last had to read up on all this several years ago.
At the time (2010ish), they even had a few reports where they showed that pretty much all the AV products were quite bad. Either they failed to detect a large portion of real malware, and/or they were a huge drain on the system's resources.
> Either they failed to detect a large portion of real malware, and/or they were a huge drain on the system's resources.
Those aren't mutually exclusive... ;-) Some things never change, I guess.
As a Windows admin who uses Unix-ish systems exclusively at home, I am a little clueless sometimes. When using AV software on our computers, I can at least point to that and say I did what I could (be reasonably expected to do), but whenever I read what people who really know about IT security have to say about the AV industry, I get the feeling it's all just a bunch of charlatans and snake oil peddlers.
But the latter is a little difficult to explain to my boss without sounding like a tinfoil-hat-wearing lunatic.
https://www.av-comparatives.org/about-us/
I may be wrong, but I can't find any info as to their sponsors other than universities and volunteer researchers.
And I'm not sure how that addresses what I said about Defender being borderline useless, because they come up short across most tests from what I remember.
Unless it has drastically improved in the last year.