Further awards from test institutes: “The investment in new technologies has paid off.” (Update)

G DATA Internet Security won the “Top Product” seal with the highest score of 18 points in the AV-Test comparative test. G DATA Internet Security also delivered perfect protection in the latest Real-World Protection Test by AV Comparatives, where only three other manufacturers were successful. G DATA also delivered 100% protection in the AV-Comparative Malware Protection Test, once again receiving the highest possible ADVANCED+ certificate for protection performance. This makes G DATA the only manufacturer to have successfully defended against every single threat across all three tests. The repetition of the top results from the spring are the result of innovative technologies and the dedicated commitment of IT security experts, as Thomas Siebert, Head of Protection Technologies at G DATA CyberDefense, explains in an interview.

The top performances of 2020 are a great thing and a big motivation for our work. The results show that our customers can rely on our products one hundred percent even in extraordinary times and that we are protecting them reliably against current and future threats. Our latest threat analysis shows that the cyber risk has become even more acute. In May this year alone, our technologies prevented more than twice as many attacks as in April. This is because the exposure to attack has become considerably greater due to the increase in online use. Even though many employees have now left their home office and gone back to their office workstations, they are nevertheless spending much more time at their computers in their private lives - for example, shopping online or ordering a delivery service for food.

In July and August 2020, independent test laboratory AV-TEST evaluated a total of 22 security programs for home users. The tests were in the protection, usability and speed categories. In the test, the testers used attack methods such as zero-day malware, drive-by attacks, downloads from websites and attacks via contaminated emails. At the same time, experts at the test laboratory evaluated the usability of the protective products. The focus here was on so-called false positives. This is because, when people are working on the Internet and websites are being blocked unnecessarily, false alarms can disrupt the workflow just as much as malware attacks. We achieved full marks in all three categories for protection, usability and performance. G DATA was one of only a few manufacturers able to fend off every single attack. The level of protection plays an important role in the tests, but performance is also evaluated. Here again, we achieved 6 out of 6 points.

G DATA also delivered perfect protection in the latest Real-World Protection Test by AV Comparatives, where only three other manufacturers were successful. And in the third test, the Malware Protection Test, we were one of four manufacturers to fend off all 10,102 threats and receive the ADVANCED+ certificate.

No other vendor delivered 100% protection across all three tests. We are among the vendors with the fewest false positives across all tests. We are very proud of these results.

On the one hand, the development of our own technologies, such as BEAST and DeepRay, has paid off in terms of protection. The following figure may illustrate how dynamic the situation is. During the first half of the year alone, we were able to identify more than 27,800 different versions of Emotet, the all-purpose weapon of the cyber criminals - this represents a new sample every nine and a half minutes on average.

DeepRay in particular is now achieving a very high proportion of detections in these tests. DeepRay is the result of many years of research and development at G DATA and has taken threat detection to a new level. With the help of artificial intelligence, we are staying one step ahead of cyber criminals because even highly developed malware cannot hide from the new analysis process.

We have been using BEAST since autumn last year. The technology specifically provides protection against new and previously unknown malware. Unlike conventional behaviour analysis, BEAST records all system behaviour in a graph and thus provides a holistic view. The technology is based on a self-developed, lightweight graph database that runs locally on the customer's computer. Thus, BEAST detects malicious processes accurately and does not need to query the user.

Just as important are the numerous initiatives that run in the background and are not easily visible from the outside. We have repeatedly carried out extensive analyses and implemented step-by-step improvements, both in terms of detection and performance. And we will also look at the latest test results in detail and question them: How might we have been able to detect the malware? Is it even malware?

We are very happy that we were able to repeat the good results from the spring during the summer, but of course we are far from being satisfied with that. Development in the malware sector is so dynamic that we cannot afford to stand still. After all, we analyse 600,000 samples every day. Although BEAST is already in productive use, we will continue to enhance this technology in the coming years. And of course, we are constantly working on further improvements in the areas of performance and the prevention of false positives.