OREANDA-NEWS. March 20, 2012. It’s easy for mobile device users to be blinded by the huge number of options to protect their Android platform security – but new tests show that Kaspersky Lab’s solution is leading the way. A recent independent study from AV-Test.org picked out Kaspersky Mobile Security as one of only two products (from a sample of 41) which successfully countered all malicious programs. Most of the so-called competition failed miserably to provide even basic protection against an ever-growing number of malicious apps targeting mobile devices. Overall, the evaluation by AV-Test.org conducted in early 2012, had given the ‘green light’ to just seven products, while 18 solutions detected less than 40% of malware samples and six of them failed to spot a single piece of rogue code.

Victor Dronov, Senior Product Manager, Kaspersky Lab, commented: “Recently the number of mobile malware samples in our database has exceeded 10 thousand. That is why we believe it’s essential to have a security solution on your Android smartphone. We are pleased with the results of independent testing by AV-Test.org – they confirm the efficiency of our product as a whole, and endorse our recently introduced combination of traditional and cloud-based security technologies in particular. These results also clearly demonstrate that our product is a market leader, among both free and paid-for products.”

Recently AV-Test.org  evaluated free solutions in tests against Kaspersky Lab and another vendor, and found that skimping on security proved “almost useless” compared with investing in online safety. This follow-up evaluation saw experts analyze as many products as possible. To provide the most accurate results, more than 600 malicious apps were chosen from 20 different malware ‘families’, all of them widespread and prevalent. The test environment included an Android emulator based on Android 2.3 and two real devices running Android 2.2 and 4.0. The ability to detect malicious apps during on-demand scanning was evaluated, but in some cases (when the product could not perform such scanning properly) the experts had to perform on-access analysis manually.

The results of the testing show that even including paid products makes little difference to the landscape compared to the earlier testing: many free and paid-for products from little-known and popular vendors appear to be useless in real life, missing a large number of malware samples. Alarmingly, six programs did not detect any malicious apps at all. For another 12 the detection rate was lower than 40%. Kaspersky Mobile Security was one of only two products to manage a 100% detection rate.