Panda Dome Advanced began poorly, ignoring our ransomware and allowing it to encrypt thousands of Office documents, images and more. As it's never appeared in the wild, there's no way an antivirus will have seen our simulated threat before, making this a useful test of its behavior monitoring abilities. We test antivirus by checking how each engine handles our own simple custom ransomware. Panda isn't currently tested at SE-Labs or AV Test, so we weren't able to get confirmation of AV-Comparatives' scores. Most companies are much more precise in their targeting Kaspersky reached 4th place, blocking 99.9% of threats, but with no false positives Avast also blocked 99.9%, and had only two. That's important, because it's much easier to block all threats if you stop every process which looks faintly suspicious. There's a potential issue in Panda's relatively high number of false positives: 25, the second highest in the report. Panda scored well in the July-October 2021 report, achieving second place as one of only three vendors to block 100% of test threats (Trend Micro and Norton were the others.) (Image credit: AV Comparatives) ProtectionĪV-Comparatives' Real-World Protection Test is a comprehensive benchmark which pits 17 top antivirus engines against the latest malware. Kaspersky and Trend Micro go further, recognizing the attacks as malicious actions and killing our testing tool immediately, preventing it trying anything else. 90% and more simply block our attacks, ensuring they have no effect. While it's true this attack may not succeed very often, the reality is most of the antivirus competition does a far better job of protecting itself. The company said these security flaws: 'could only be exploited by malware that has escalated admin rights and has not been detected by any of our technologies (signatures, Cloud, heuristics, contextual routines, behavioral protection,…).' Panda also said it had 'taken note' of our suggestion for a fix for the most significant attack, though didn't commit to applying it. A common example might be via a spam email, with text which persuaded you to open an attached Office document, and then run an embedded macro. These exploits required an attacker persuading you to run a malicious script or macro on your system, with Administrator rights. The second effectively removed all Panda's protective layers, enabling malware to do whatever it liked. One of our test attacks successfully disabled part of Panda's real-time file scanning system, allowing us to download malicious files without detection. Testing Panda's self-protection revealed a couple of vulnerabilities. Malware sometimes tries to disable an antivirus before launching a full infection attempt, so it's important any security app can defend itself. (Image credit: Panda Security) Self-protection It's not perfect - too many buttons just open a browser tab, rather than do anything locally - but we found it reasonably easy to use. Selecting a button takes you to that function, where a Back button returns you to the main dashboard when you're done. Functions are accessed via 17 buttons (Scan, Firewall, Support and so on.) That's a lot, but button icons do a reasonable job of telling you what they do, and you can turn on captions for all buttons with a click. Otherwise, the main interface works well. (We checked Panda's Support site to find out what 'Show Panda News' was supposed to do, but couldn't find it mentioned anywhere. We found a 'Show Panda News' switch in Settings, and turned off, hoping this would help but no, it didn't make any difference at all. There's another small annoyance in a regularly updated banner at the bottom of the dashboard, with links to various blog posts on the Panda site. You must scroll down to access everything. The app has four rows of buttons for various functions, but Panda is so keen on leaving free space for you to view the photo, that only the first row of buttons is visible. This looks good, but creates an immediate usability issue. Panda Dome's interface stands out immediately for its desktop-style wallpaper background.
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