After spending a few weeks testing cloud antivirus, I now finally have my answer to my own question on whether can a cloud antivirus replace the traditional antivirus. I’ve said before that ALL antivirus slows down the computer and that is a fact. The amount of malware today grows very rapidly compared to many years ago and the same goes to the virus signature file (some antivirus signature files is as big as a few hundred megabytes). Just imagine cross checking one file that you want to scan with a database containing millions of record… Some antivirus company such as AVG and Norton implements scanning technique that is really fast and efficient, hence the time taken to complete a full scan is really short. However if you look at Dr.Web antivirus, the percent increase to complete a full scan is more than 2000% if compared to AVG 2011.
Cloud Antivirus Review
So cloud antivirus is signature-less and supposedly won’t make your computer slow. I’ve benchmarked Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro, Immunet Protect Plus, Prevx, Trend Micro Titanium and if compared the results against AVG Antivirus 2011 which uses the traditional method, AVG 2011 is actually faster! Don’t get me wrong, cloud antivirus are light but definitely not the lightest. Second important aspect is how good is the detection rate? If an antivirus doesn’t require a signature locally on the computer, that means it must have some kind of behavior based detection to know if that file is dangerous or not and subsequently cross checking it with the antivirus servers. Logically the cloud antivirus cannot be cross checking EVERY file on your computer with their servers or else the scanning time may take hours or days to complete…

I have tested Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro, Immunet Protect Plus, Prevx and Trend Micro Titanium against:

a) 27 viruses that are quite old (most antivirus can already recognize them as threats)
b) 3 fully undetected malwares (2 trojans and 1 bot) with the initials AARC, PXR and RB.
c) 1 well-known remote administration tool (RAT) with the initials BSN.

Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro
Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro Review
- Detected all 27 virus
- Unable to detect AARC, PXR and RB
- Detected BSN and able to successfully remove even with protect process enabled.

Immunet Protect Plus
- Detected 26/27 virus
- Unable to detect AARC, PXR and RB
- Unable to detect BSN

Prevx
- Detected 20/27 virus
- Detected AARC and PXR but missed RB
- Detected BSN

Trend Micro Titanium
- Detected 23/27 virus
- Unable to detect AARC, PXR and RB
- Unable to detect BSN

I did not include Comodo Cloud Scanner and Hitman Pro because they are on-demand scanners and doesn’t provide real time protection. If you still remember the review I did on Zemana AntiLogger with a very positive review, it is able to block all (b) and (c). Out of curiosity, I wanted to know if the detection rate of Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro is the same as the traditional Panda Antivirus Pro 2011. So I installed Panda Antivirus Pro 2011 and it has the exact same detection result as the Panda Cloud. Prevx seems to be very good in detecting trojans but it misses the fully undetectable RB bot.

To compare the detection rate of Cloud antivirus against AVG, Avira and Avast:
1. AVG Free 2011 has the same detection rate as Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro.
2. Avira AntiVir Personal unable to detect AARC and RB.
3. Avast Free 5.0 missed 2 virus, unable to detect AARC, PXR and RB.

Currently I would only dare to say Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro is good enough to be a possible replacement for traditional signature based antivirus. The detection rate is as good as the 3 big A’s (avira, avg, avast) and also quite light on system resources. Panda Cloud Antivirus is also very easy to configure with only a few easy to understand settings.

Thanks to Kurt, a member of the moderator team in the Panda Cloud forums for requesting 20 Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro activation codes to be given away to Raymond.CC readers. The Pro version of Panda Cloud cost US $29.95 per year and has every feature that is on the free version with an additional behavioral analysis of running processes, automatic USB vaccination to protect from autorun malware, automatic & transparent upgrades of new engine and program versions, VIP support and no nagging advertisements. If you’d like to be in the giveaway list, please first make sure you’re a subscriber and then leave a comment.

UPDATE: 20 Winners has been randomly selected.
Panda Cloud Antivirus Pro Giveaway


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