Posts tagged '2018'

Malware scanning is not enough. You have to hack, too.

Posted on March 20th, 2019 by SE Labs Team and tagged 2018, anti-virus, enterprise, hacking, home user, security testing, security vendor, small business, targeted attacks, test results

Clear, open testing is needed and now available to help people trust security tests.

Latest reports now online.

A year ago we decided to put our support behind a new testing Standard proposed by the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO). The goal behind the Standard is good for everyone: if testing is conducted openly then testers such as us can receive due credit for doing a thorough job; you the reader can gain confidence in the results; and the vendors under test can understand their failings and make improvements, which then creates stronger products that we can all enjoy.

The Standard does not dictate how testers should test. There are pages of detail, but I can best summarise it like this:

Say what you are going to do, then do it. And be prepared to prove it.

(Indeed, a poor test could still comply with the AMTSO Standard, but at least you would be able to understand how the test was conducted and could then judge its worth with clear information and not marketing hype!)

Trust security tests

We don’t think that it’s unreasonable to ask testers to make some effort to prove their results. Whether you are spending £30 on a copy of a home anti-antivirus product or several million on a new endpoint upgrade project, if you are using a report to help with your buying decision you deserve to know how the test was run, whether or not some vendors were at a disadvantage and if anyone was willing and able to double-check the results.

Since the start of the year we put our endpoint reports through the public pilot and then, once the Standard was officially adopted, through the full public process. Our last reports were judged to comply with the AMTSO Standard and we’ve submitted these latest reports for similar assessment.

At the time of writing we didn’t know if the reports from this round of testing complied. We’re pleased to report today that they did. You can confirm this by checking the AMTSO reference link at the bottom of page three of this report or here. This helps people trust security tests.

Ask us

If you spot a detail in this report that you don’t understand, or would like to discuss, please contact us via our Twitter or Facebook accounts.

SE Labs uses current threat intelligence to make our tests as realistic as possible. To learn more about how we test, how we define ‘threat intelligence’ and how we use it to improve our tests please visit our website and follow us on Twitter.

This test report was funded by post-test consultation services provided by SE Labs to security vendors. Vendors of all products included in this report were provided with early access to results and the ability to dispute details for free. SE Labs has submitted the testing process behind this report for compliance with the AMTSO Standard v1.0.

Our latest reports, for enterprise, small business and home users are now available for free from our website. Please download them and follow us on Twitter and/or Facebook to receive updates and future reports.

Posted on February 20th, 2019 by SE Labs Team and tagged 2018, anti-virus, enterprise, home user, security testing, security vendor, small business, standards, test results

Email security gateways protection:  Email security test explores how and when services detect and stop threats.

Latest report now online.

This new email protection test shows a wide variation in the abilities of the services that we have assessed.

You might see the figures as being disappointing. Surely Microsoft Office 365 can’t be that bad? An eight per cent accuracy rating seems incredible.

Literally not credible. If it misses most threats then organisations relying on it for email security would be hacked to death (not literally).

Email security gateways protection 

But our results are subtler than just reflecting detection rates and it’s worth understanding exactly what we’re testing here to get the most value from the data. We’re not testing these services with live streams of real emails, in which massive percentages of messages are legitimate or basic spam. Depending on who you talk to, around 50 per cent of all email is spam. We don’t test anti-spam at all, in fact, but just the small percentage of email that comprises targeted attacks.

In other words, these results show what can happen when attackers apply themselves to specific targets. They do not reflect a “day in the life” of an average user’s email inbox.

We have also included some ‘commodity’ email threats, though – the kind of generic phishing and social engineering attacks that affect everyone. All services ought to stop every one of these. Similarly, we included some clean emails to ensure that the services were not too aggressively configured. All services ought to allow all these through to the inbox.

So when you see results that appear to be surprising, remember that we’re testing some very specific types of attacks that happen in real life, but not in vast numbers comparable to spam or more general threats.

Threats at arm’s length

The way that services handle threats are varied and effective to greater or lesser degrees. To best reflect how useful their responses are, we have a rating system that accounts for their different approaches. Essentially, services that keep threats as far as possible from users will win more points than those who let the message appear in or near the inbox. Conversely, those that allow the most legitimate messages through to the inbox rate higher than those which block them without the possibility of recovery from a junk folder or quarantine.

Posted on December 12th, 2018 by SE Labs Team and tagged 2018, anti-virus, cloud, email, email security, enterprise, ESS, hacking, home user, internet, online security, security testing, security vendor, small business, targeted attacks, test results

Attack chain scoring

Posted on October 25th, 2018 by SE Labs Team and tagged 2018, anti-virus, enterprise, home user, security testing, security vendor, small business, targeted attacks, test results

Network security appliances tested. Over the last few months we have seen a surge in attacks using apparently innocent documents that install malware covertly on victims’ systems.

Unless you are running specialist monitoring tools, or very effective security software, you probably won’t see any symptoms of the attack.

The goals of these attacks are varied. In some cases they provide remote access to hackers. In others so-called cryptocurrency mining software is installed. These programs (ab)use your systems’ processing power in an attempt to generate cryptocurrencies such as Monero. The attackers get rich off your power bill.

While there are variations in how the attacks work, the typical path to compromise involves opening the document, which could be in Microsoft Word format, after which an exploit runs a PowerShell script. This, in turn, downloads and installs the malware.

Network security appliances

In this report we investigate how effectively some very popular network security products are at handling these and other threats.

As usual, we have also thrown in some particularly devious targeted attacks that appear to be completely legitimate applications but that provide us with remote access to unprotected targets. When we gain this access we try to hack the target in the same way a real attacker would. This gives the security products the best chance of detecting and potentially blocking the bad behaviour.

The good news is that all of these products were able to detect many (if not all) of the threats. Some were able to block most, although complete protection is not guaranteed. As always, a layered approach to protection is best. For advice on which endpoint software to choose see our Endpoint Protection test results on our website.

Posted on September 12th, 2018 by SE Labs Team and tagged 2018, enterprise, hacking, monitoring, security testing, security vendor, small business, targeted attacks, test results

What happens when your choice of security software handles an attack? Does is detect, block, quarantine or clean? Or fail?

Latest reports now online.

It should be simple. You’ve clicked on the wrong link, opened a malicious email or installed something inadvisable. A threat is now attacking your PC and it’s up to your choice of anti-malware product to handle things.

But what does it actually do under the hood?

Detected, blocked, quarantined, cleaned?

Detection is important. The product should recognise that a threat exists, even if it can’t fully handle it. At least you can receive an alert and seek help (or an alternative anti-malware program!)
Blocking threats is also very important. Ideally the protection system will prevent the malware from running. Sometimes that doesn’t happen and the malware runs. In that case one hopes that the security software would recognise that bad things are happening and stop them. This is what we call ‘neutralisation’.

Following a neutralisation your computer might not be completely clean. There could be some rogue code still on your hard disk, possibly even on your Desktop. There might also be entries in the Registry and elsewhere that will try to run this code (or code that has been deleted or quarantined).

You probably want your system to be protected by having threats blocked and, in cases where they are not, that they be removed as fast as possible and all significant traces removed. We call this happy state ‘complete remediation’.

In SE Labs tests we measure all of these outcomes, including the worst one: compromise.

Protection Details

If you want to know how the different products tested in this report handled threats in detail, check out the Protection Details table and graph on page 10 of our reports. We don’t show details of which products completely remediated threats and which did not when neutralising but the Protection Ratings on page eight take these into account.

If you spot a detail in this report that you don’t understand, or would like to discuss, please contact us via our Twitter or Facebook accounts.

See all blog posts relating to test results.

SE Labs uses current threat intelligence to make our tests as realistic as possible. To learn more about how we test, how we define ‘threat intelligence’ and how we use it to improve our tests please visit our website and follow us on Twitter.

Posted on July 24th, 2018 by SE Labs Team and tagged 2018, anti-virus, enterprise, home user, security testing, security vendor, small business, test results

Sometimes testers need to be tested too. We’re always up for a challenge!

Benefits of following a Standard

Are you buying solid protection or snake oil?

Posted on May 9th, 2018 by SE Labs Team and tagged 2018, anti-virus, enterprise, home user, security testing, security vendor, small business, standards, test results