Hello! I am wondering what AV would you people recommend. Avoiding Kaspersky, because “Russia”. Currently on Bitdefneder, I am wondering if I should allow it to renew, or are there any other options. I heard good things about ESET recently. I do not care for VPN, because I use proton for that.
ESET is good. Very light on system too. You can look Latest Tests - AV-Comparatives and make your decision.
Deep Instinct. Given random sample set, Deep Instinct blows others out of the water. I am surprised they aren’t much louder about what and how they do.
Would you be interested in me recording a session with ESET and Deep Instinct side-by-side?
Possibly others?
DefenderUI for free, Sophos/Bitdefender for paid
Shamelssly picthing Protectstar here
Their customer support is worst. If you encounter any issues you are on your own
Sure! Maybe deep instict vs ESET vs bitdefender vs kaspersky vs MS windows defender? So all the top picks are covered?
So, here are my quick notes. I’ve used two VMs only, used MSDef → ESET → uninstall ESET → BD on one VM in this order, so this slightly skews the results, but not by much, I guess.
Sample set size:
docx: 17
exe: 46
pdf: 3
xlsx: 22
total: 88
Latest samples from mwb as of 15-May-2024, 19:20 CEST.
Updates:
MSDef: forgot to check exactly, left in default update mode 
but I guess fairly recent
ESET SBS: DB update from 19:46:23 CEST; ESET Small Business Security with LiveGrid, PUA and LiveGuard participation (sending docs to ESET, WHAT??? Why would you do that?) enabled
BitDefender installed ~20:10:00 CEST, can’t find when was the DB updated (is it really missing in the UI?)
Results:
Deep Instinct: 100% efficacy, VERY quick
MS Defender: 4.54% efficacy (only 4 samples caught!), second quickest
ESET Small Business Security: 97.72% efficacy
BitDefender: efficacy 28.41% (caught 25 samples, yet had the benefit of being installed the last) but DAMN does it slow down the system! Like seriously, who considers BD a quick AV?
I’ve cut off Deep Instinct measurements after 60 seconds, MSDef after 120, BitDefender and ESET SBS after 12 minutes (notice how BD was not fully done even then, yet detected only 28.41% of samples) and ESET has this weird CPU utilisation pattern (it was not running full disk scan).
CPU utilization chart over at
https://bronze-lonee-2.tiiny.site
I am too lazy to get Kaspersky, sorry
I can get Eset trial, BD trial, got Defender deployed right now. Just tested 86 samples, it took 2 minutes for MSDef to detect… 9 of those (sourced from mwb). In comparison Deep Instinct detected all 86 sampes in 45s seconds (and that’s on an aging Xeon 5220R CPU with 2 cores allocated in VMware). Kaspersky wants a credit card even for trial. Oh well, guess it’s revolut time! Gimme some time please 
Interesting results! As a side note, to check BD update status, you need to go to notifications and find “Update completed successfully”, although that only tells you when YOUR app updated, not the DB age … very intuitive /s. I guess I should look into Deep Instinct and maybe compare prices to ESET. Thank you so much for this test!
For the BD update, yeah, I’ve seen only that notification so I’ve figured out I am good to go 
For the kicks of it, I’ve re-ran the test again with BD and MSDef now, 12hrs later:
BD efficacy: 60.23% (35 samples still left on the disk) - how can someone seriously consider this a solid product? Like WOWZIE, that’s pretty damn bad. And the CPU? 100% for the 12 minutes I cared… That must be me, it can’t be that bad. Anyone care to test as well?
This is how I do it, under admin powershell (adjust the 720s timeout in both places depending on how long you want to wait, there’s an initial 11s wait for quiescing operations):
( Get-Counter -Counter "\Processor(_Total)\% Processor Time" -SampleInterval 1 -MaxSamples 720 | Select -ExpandProperty CounterSamples | Export-Csv C:\Temp\perf-bitdefender.csv &) ; sleep 11 ; & 'C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe' x -p<you know, I am not posting here> *.zip ; sleep 720 ; (dir -Recurse -File -Exclude *.zip).count
I process resulting .csv(s) in R, but excel may be just as fast with 1 .csv file
Get the .zip files from mwb (possibly the 3 latest hourly?)
MSDef efficacy: 20.45% (70 samples left on the disk) with updates from 16-May-2024 02:15. Initially it was very quick on unpacking the files, but 100% malware left on disk, the hell? Re-ran folder scan, took 2:11 min, left 70 samples on disk (number above). Ughh… That’s pretty terrible.
Also, I’d appreciate if someone could re-run the tests, please?
EDIT: added Avast, DB update from 16-May-2024, 09:50, 27 samples left on disk after about 80s → 69.32% efficacy.
So from these, I’d say - if you can’t go with Deep Instinct, go at least with ESET, maybe Avast (if you prefer worse protection and less CPU load - Avast does not have those weird CPU patterns ESET does).