AV-Test.org has released their March/April Full Product Tests results. They can be seen online at http://www.av-test.org/en/tests/home-user/marapr-2012/.

We are happy to announce that Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.5.2 has achieved the highest score in  usability.

“Panda Cloud Antivirus is one of the fastest (lightest) products we’ve ever tested. Even then, the product offered a stellar protection against all kinds of malware and it performed very well in our 0day testing. Panda Cloud Antivirus offers a stellar protection against malware attacks, and it ranked higher than some paid Internet Security offerings from other vendors. We congratulate Panda for their high ranks in our comprehensive tests!” Andreas Marx, CEO AV-Test.org.

The usability section of the test looks at, among other things, an antivirus product’s ability to not slow down the computer during daily, normal use. In this section of the test Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.5.2 achieved a score of 7 while the average of all antivirus products tested was a 10 (the lower the better). The “slowest” product achieved a score of 15.

Another section of the usability testing looks at false positives or false detections of legitimate software as malware during a system scan. Over half a million known good files were tested and Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.5.2 only reported 3 as malware. That’s a 0.0006% false positive rate. The average of all products tested was 10 false positives (0.002%) and the product with the most false positives had 43 (0.01%).

Finally AV-Test.org also looks at false warnings or false blockings of certain actions during download, installation and use of legitimate software. In this test Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.5.2 performed flawlessly with 0 false warnings, while the worse offender had 5 false warnings.

We are very happy with these results as they validate the main benefit of lightness and ease of use of Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.5.2, which were the main objective we had in mind when developing this product.

Of course protection and repair are also very important parts of the tests. In this respect Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.5.2 performed very well also, achieving a 5.0 protection score as compared to other free antivirus such as Avast (4.5) and Microsoft Security Essentials (3.0). In repair we did not do as good a job as we should have. Even though Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.5.2 still achieved a respectable 4.0 which is ahead of Avast’s 3.0, we are not happy with these results and are working very hard to improve this metric with the new Panda Cloud Antivirus 2.0 which will be released this year.