PC Pitstop is thrilled to announce that we’ve done it again! PC Matic blew away the entire field of products in the latest Virus Bulletin test with a record setting 99.9% RAP score!
Virus Bulletin has been hailed by IT professionals as the most respected testing house, and PC Matic has continued on our path of out performing the competition on the RAP test. The VB100 test uses over a million samples to determine how effective the various antivirus products are at actually protecting their customers. Products are scored on a reactive and proactive basis, combining those scores to deduce the RAP score.
Virus Bulletin applauded PC Matic’s whitelist approach saying it provided, “…some truly epic scores in our RAP/Response tests.”
Virus Bulletin’s Results
PC Matic ranked first both proactively and reactively with an astounding 99.9% in both tests and a RAP score of 99.9%. Second place for proactive testing was 17.4% behind us and second place for reactive testing was 2.2% behind. The gap for reactive protection is typically smaller as all vendors are becoming proficient in blocking known threats. However, proactive test scores are used to show how a product performs against unknown threats. This means that second place missed more than 17% of the unknown files they were tested against. In an age where malware is often only used once, stopping unknown samples is key. This testing helps provide clear third-party evidence that our whitelisting protection is superior to our competition’s use of blacklisting and heuristics.
The security industry, including the testing houses such as Virus Bulletin, place a higher value on not blocking good files (false positives) than accurately identifying bad files (false negatives). In the Virus Bulletin methodology, there is zero tolerance for false positives. If a product has one false positive out of a million, then the product fails VB100 certification. On the other hand, the exact same product can mis-identify hundreds if not thousands of bad files as good with little consequence on ratings and certification. The most recent Virus Bulletin testing included approximately one million good files, and PC Matic incorrectly identified less than fifteen thousand. This represents a 1% error rate or 99% whitelist accuracy rate.
In the event of a false positive, PC Matic minimizes the customer impact. The good process is not allowed to run, but it is not erased from the hard drive. The process is sent to our research team to be re-categorized within 24 hours. Although this may provide a minor inconvenience, it is considered minimal when compared to allowing a potentially malicious file into the PC for corruption.
We’ve already made astounding improvements to our product’s stability and protection since we submitted it to this test so we expect to see an even better performance in the coming testing.
Below is a graph of all of PC Matic’s historic Virus Bulletin test results. By clicking on the graphed plots, you will be directed to each individual report. The reports are also available via the table below, by clicking on the month/year to access the full report. The table also shows the exact RAP score for each test.
PC Matic Historic Virus Bulletin RAP Test Results
| Date of Test | RAP Score | RAP Average | RAP High | RAP Low | PC Matic Proactive Score | RAP Proactive Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| April 2014 | 95.80 | 87.70 | 95.80 | 66.20 | 92.00 | 78.92 |
| August 2014 | 95.98 | 90.88 | 98.20 | 40.80 | 89.60 | 80.55 |
| December 2014 | 86.89 | 82.43 | 91.63 | 22.50 | 72.28 | 69.72 |
| April 2015 | 92.79 | 83.23 | 94.79 | 14.84 | 87.49 | 76.85 |
| August 2015 | 92.52 | 75.56 | 92.52 | 25.10 | 86.10 | 65.72 |
| October 2015 | 90.71 | 87.31 | 95.95 | 64.3 | 86.47 | 78.56 |
| December 2015 | 93.42 | 84.99 | 93.50 | 67.70 | 89.80 | 70.57 |
| April 2016 | 87.07 | 77.90 | 87.40 | 31.50 | 87.70 | 63.94 |
| August 2016 | 99.90 | 81.03 | 99.90 | 41.90 | 99.90 | 66.60 |
| December 2016 | 99.90 | 82.66 | 99.90 | 63.3 | 99.90 | 64.35 |
