AV-Test.org, an independent testing group at the Otto-von-Guericke-University (Magdeburg, Germany), tested 29 anti-malware products with a very large set of files (606,901 to be specific). The goal was to test detection capabilities only, not cleaning. Products were set with their most aggressive detection options, such as using all heuristics and testing inside archives.

In the test set were:

68,864 backdoors
407,487 Trojan Horses
47,891 bots (zombies)
82,659 worms
Some of the results:
The best product, WebWasher, detected 99.83 percent, but this is a gateway product. The best desktop product, at 99.56 percent, is AVK 2007.
The worst product, Computer Associates's eTrust-VET, detected 62.12 percent.
The average product detected 86.95 percent, the median 90.97 percent.
All products were last updated on Friday, May 18th, prior to the test. Only current malware was used, meaning all samples were seen in the last 12 months. Only Win32 malware, not 16-bit Windows or DOS, was used, and all malware had to be functional, as opposed to corrupted or benign samples.


Here is the full data set: Program # Detected Detection %
WebWasher 605,846 99.83%
AVK 2007 604,255 99.56%
AntiVir 603,408 99.42%
F-Secure 594,333 97.93%
Symantec 593,355 97.77%
Kaspersky 592,606 97.64%
Fortinet 589,028 97.06%
Avast! 584,574 96.32%
AVG 583,541 96.15%
Rising 582,772 96.02%
BitDefender 580,700 95.68%
Norman 574,476 94.66%
Ikarus 561,607 92.54%
Panda 558,899 92.09%
Trend Micro 552,107 90.97%
Nod32 536,043 88.32%
McAfee 529,680 87.28%
Dr Web 520,959 85.84%
F-Prot 517,491 85.27%
VBA32 498,264 82.10%
Sophos 496,135 81.75%
eSafe 495,074 81.57%
Microsoft 488,942 80.56%
Ewido 456,660 75.24%
VirusBuster 441,341 72.72%
Command 414,036 68.22%
ClamAV 387,276 63.81%
QuickHeal 382,557 63.03%
eTrust-VET 376,983 62.12%