In 21st century, everyone hires a digital knight that fights off or blocks – vulnerable attacks , thieves, spy or other harmful intruders trying to get into your castle (Pc, laptop or other digital device). Before assigning such protector to do the hard work to live your life without any worries, you need to test their ability. At DigitFreak we do the same, when we test the security tools for your PC or other portable devices.
We deliberately test the software for extensive protection and prevention ability. Some of them delivers near perfect results, while other just give up. Testing a security tool isn’t easy — we have to deal with the fair amount of bottlenecks or our own limitation to clone the infections and vulnerability.
At DigitFreak we test every security tools manually with our own custom malware and virus scripts along with other virus samples collected for testing. We deliberately infect a protected system to find out if it is capable of fighting it off.
Testing with Virus samples and custom scripts:
The DigitFreak virus and script sample includes malware, scareware, adware, worms, rootkit and Trojans. We also use free online virus test scripts provided by eicar.com and DigitFreak’s custom virus script.
We used to test the security tools with the premium keylogger software, but most of the security tools are immune to it, thus we decided to shoot it when really necessary.
We do full manual update of the security tool we are reviewing – to make sure that it has the latest virus database to provide best results. We also make sure that the program itself has the latest build, version number and the original md5 checksum.
We bombard the security tool with the virus sample and rate it for the number of successful detection. If the tool detects 90% + virus sample, we rate it 9 or even 10 score for virus detection and best virus database and algorithm.
We also load various known malware-hosting urls to test whether the tool we are testing is capable of holding off the user from visting it and thus, preventing the overall damage and rate the software accordingly.
Live detection of viruses, vulnerability and security breach is also essential – we check if the tool automatically detects the virus from the virus sample folders or if we need to open each folder to let the tool detect the security risk for the computer.
There are various other factors that we need to test to score the test tool effectively, like – virus removal, detection, firewall, url blocking, restrictive control, virus database, prevention and custom controls.
Prevention is better than cure – so we basically concentrate on the detection ability of the security tool to make sure that it provides maximum security by testing it with our virus samples.
Naturally a product scores a full ten points for each threat it eliminates and detects on sight. If any of the virus sample is somehow managed to escape the security – we execute the program in the sandbox (sandboxie) to note how the product reacts.
At the end we include the results from the independent lab test and merge with our own results for optimal test results. DigitFreak expert reviewing team follows these guidelines to bring the best test results and scores.
