How in the Tech

Testing your Antivirus/Firewall for Leaks

By Adam Myers ⋅ June 29, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Security

It’s good Internet sense to be running some sort of antivirus and firewall protection – everyone knows that and most heed the advice. But how well does your security software perform? Most of us would like to believe that our software does an excellent job of protecting us but how can you be sure? There are numerous online reviews of many competing products or anecdotal accounts by friends or colleagues, but at the end of the day they are all subjective and opinionated. Testing methodologies can skew the results and make any security suite behave poorly or not. This is not an attempt to call out bias in reviews but rather an attempt to explain the difficulty in ranking the suites.

Comodo Leaktest is a free application that tests your antivirus/firewall software for leaks. By simulating different methods of attacks or exploits, Leaktest can determine your level of vulnerability without causing harm to your computer. The software runs a set of 34 tests with variants of rootkits, invasion, injection, info send, impersonation, and hijacking tests. Each test is scored with a simple pass/fail where a pass is worth 10 points that results in a perfect score of 340. The specifics of each test can be access from the ? button in the interface. However, the software does not provide any solution to the problems it uncovers so further research will be necessary if you were going to attempt a fix yourself.

So you might be asking now why this leak test is any better, or even different, than any other online review. Leaktest does not test against specific exploits or viruses like most of those reviews focus on. Instead, Comodo focuses on common behavior of malware – such as opening random webpages or injection of a new auto-start application.

You can see that my antivirus scored an abysmal 120 out 340, which goes to show you that you are never as well off as you think!