Free is good: No-cost Panda Software tops AV-Test's rankings of antivirus software

Antivirus suites are only as good as their latest tests. And in AV-test.org’s latest roundup for July and August, the usual suspects—BitDefender, Kaspersky, McAfee, and Symantec—came out on top.
The same holds true for the free options. If you’re a cheapskate, you can download Panda Security’s free cloud antivirus and have a good chance that it will catch everything that the shadowy corners of the Web can throw at it—as it did in AV-test’s own proving ground.
But if you think that Microsoft’s own Windows Defender (or Microsoft Security Essentials in Windows 7) antimalware solution will do the job, you’re almost entirely wrong. Microsoft caught less than 80 percent of both the known malware that AV-test.org threw at it, as well as the unknown or so-called zero-day malware that it was tested against. It’s like saying your roof will catch 80 percent of the rain—eventually, there’s going to be a leak.

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