Independent Testing Shows Which Business Security Products Actually Hold Up When It Matters

AV-Comparatives publishes its Business Security Test results for March to June 2026, as ransomware and supply-chain attacks continue to disrupt companies of every size

INNSBRUCK, Austria, July 15, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- When Iranian-linked hackers breached medical device maker Stryker in March 2026, they did not need a sophisticated zero-day exploit to cause chaos. Once inside, they triggered simultaneous factory resets on more than 200,000 corporate devices across 79 countries, grinding order processing, production and shipping to a halt for days. Two months later, Foxconn confirmed that the Nitrogen ransomware group had stolen an alleged 8 terabytes of data from its North American factories, including project files tied to major technology clients. These are not isolated cases. They are part of a first half of 2026 in which manufacturing, healthcare, government and financial organisations of every size have been hit, often through a single compromised endpoint or a trusted third party.

Against this backdrop, AV-Comparatives, the independent Austria-based testing institute, has published the results of its Business Security Test for March to June 2026, evaluating 16 leading endpoint security products under real-world conditions.

The Business Main-Test Series examined how well each product withstood live malware attacks encountered through everyday web use, pre-existing malware introduced via disk or network, and false alarms on both common business software and non-business applications. A dedicated Performance Test also measured the impact each product has on system speed during everyday tasks such as file copying, archiving, application launches and web browsing.

Sixteen vendors took part: Avast, Bitdefender, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Elastic, ESET, G Data, K7, Kaspersky, ManageEngine, Microsoft, Norton, SenseOn, Sophos, Trellix and VIPRE.

Across 400 real-world test cases collected between March and June, Kaspersky, Bitdefender and Elastic each reached a 99.8 percent protection rate, the strongest results in this round. In the dedicated Malware Protection Test, which used 1,000 recent malware samples, Elastic achieved a perfect 100 percent detection rate, with Avast and Norton close behind at 99.8 percent. Every single product tested recorded zero false alarms on common business software, a result that matters as much to IT administrators as raw detection numbers do.

On system performance, ESET and Kaspersky posted the lowest impact scores in the entire field, meaning day-to-day work on a protected machine was barely affected, while several enterprise-grade EDR platforms aimed at larger organisations traded some speed for deeper investigative capability.