AV-Comparatives firewall test March 2014, with Norton participating

http://www.av-comparatives.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/avc_fw_201403_en.pdf

 

Kinda dissapointing. Nortons firewall provides less protection that the Windows firewall and fails in several important areas. It wasn't alone in doing that, at least. Comodo and G Data were also in the test, but apparently pulled out when they failed miserable, as this article written before that fact shows:

 

http://translate.google.com.tr/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=tr&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chip.de%2Fartikel%2FFirewall-Test-Kostenlose-und-kostenpflichtige-Tools-fuer-Windows_32878576.html&act=url

Pretty ugly results - It'll be interesting to see if anyone comments...

http://www.av-comparatives.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/avc_fw_201403_en.pdf

 

Kinda dissapointing. Nortons firewall provides less protection that the Windows firewall and fails in several important areas. It wasn't alone in doing that, at least. Comodo and G Data were also in the test, but apparently pulled out when they failed miserable, as this article written before that fact shows:

 

http://translate.google.com.tr/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=tr&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chip.de%2Fartikel%2FFirewall-Test-Kostenlose-und-kostenpflichtige-Tools-fuer-Windows_32878576.html&act=url

" It'll be interesting to see if anyone comments"

 

Yep, I second that opinion.

 

B/R,

OK, I'm not an employee much less an engineer who works for Symantec, but I would just give my opinion about.

 

It's difficult to give an opinion on how these tests are done by AV-Compartives, personally I have never based on the results of these to make a choice about what Security software to install on my computer.
The bizarre thing is that until Symantec participated in these tests, often turned out to be one of the best solutions for computer security.


Ever since Symantec has decided to no longer participate in these tests, Symantec has also suddenly forgotten how software should be done? This leaves me to think about the reliability of tests.

 

Based on my personal experience, I can only say that I can't agree at all.

For many years now I have fixed +/- (many computers, really so many I've lost count), perhaps more than 50 computers of friends, friends of my friends, relatives and colleagues.
The surprising result is that many of the computers that I've had to repair or format as they were infected and unusable, only once or twice I found a Norton product installed on them.
This is not due to the fact that no one ever install a Norton product on his own computer, I know many people who use NIS/NAV/etc., but these perhaps only by some miracle and/or luck they never asked for my help?

My answer is obviously no!

 

Anyway, I am more convinced than ever that the first line of defense for our computers, we are ourselves.

Perhaps others will have experienced different things from mine, it's normal.

 

Sandro

 

 

Edit:  AS Apostolos say     " It'll be interesting to see if anyone comments"

A post from an Emsisoft employee:

 

"I spent the last day trying to replicate their results but haven't been able to do so to be honest. In general both ECHO REPLY as well as NetBIOS ports are considered "restricted". That means, even if you allowed the application who serves them by accident, unless the computer or the network that sent the request is marked as trusted, packets will be dropped. RDP is disabled by default in Windows and it needs to be enabled manually, which is why there is no default restricted port rule for it. But both NetBIOS as well as pings should have been blocked no matter what.

I asked the AVC staff for more detailed information. In general they are very cooperative and easy to work with, so I hope we find out what went wrong in their tests so we can fix it."

 

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?s=5c5b29137b6d5ce95e79250f96b45f89&p=2356645&postcount=26

I lifted this comment from Midnight Cowboy, site manager at www.techsupportalert.com which says this

 

Choosing an antivirus for any platform solely on the basis of a set of test results is a dodgy game at best. The results you quote for instance are almost reversed for TrustGo and Avast! in the space of just a couple of months. Different tests will also give different results and the worst thing that anyone can do is to swap out one product for another on the basis of a test score.

 

{This was in reference to AVComparatives' Android app reviews.}

 

I tend to agree. I prefer to rely on real world performance and so far, Norton has yet to let me down.