ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 2015 Review by AV-TEST

Executive Summary
In January 2014, AV-TEST performed a review of the new version of Check Point ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 2015 (13.0.063.00). The product was tested in regards to Protection, Performance and Usability.

To perform the test runs, a clean Windows 7 image was used on several identical PCs. On this image, the security software was installed. Access to the internet was enabled at all times in order to allow cloud queries and the like.

The Check Point product received very good results in all tested categories. It protected against 100% of the tested malicious URLs and only caused one false positive with minor prevalence. The performance impact was also very low.

Compared to the regular public certification testing that AV-TEST does this version of the Check Point product would have ended up as one of the top products.

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Products Tested
The testing occurred in January 2014. AV-TEST used the new release of Check Point ZoneAlarm Extreme Security.
The test platform was Windows 7 Ultimate (English), SP1 (64-Bit).

Test Results
The first test category is Protection which consists of two separate tests:

• Protection against 0-day malware attacks, inclusive of web and e-mail threats (Real-World Testing) 
• Detection of widespread and prevalent malware discovered in the last 4 weeks (the AV-TEST reference set) 

 Check Point protected against 100% of the threats in the Real-World Testing with 64 malicious URLs.

The average protection rate of all products in the latest AV-TEST (November/December 2013 testing) was 94%. The average detection rate of prevalent malware was 96% in the last published test. Check Point performed much better than the average with a detection rate of 99.06% against a set of 11442 malicious and prevalent files.

Overall Check Point showed near to perfect results in the Protection category.

Whenever the Protection is measured it is necessary to check for false positives as well. This is done with three different tests: 

• False detections of legitimate software as malware during a system scan 
• False warnings concerning certain actions carried out whilst installing and using legitimate software 
• False blockages of certain actions carried out whilst installing and using legitimate software 

There was only one incident during these tests. In the scan of 386,287 benign files Check Point triggered on one file from the program AntiyGhostbustersProfessionalEdition1.0 and falsely reported this as HEUR:Trojan.Win32.Generic.

In the active installation and usage test of 43 benign applications there was no single positive.

 Finally the performance impact on the system was measured with 5 typical user actions: visiting websites, downloading software, installing and running programs and copying data.

AV-TEST assigns five different performance scores depending on the impact for each category. A score of 1 means nearly no impact and a score of 5 means very high impact. So in total a product can achieve a total score between 5 (nearly no impact) and 25 (very high impact).

Check Point achieved a total score of 7, which is a very good result meaning that the performance impact is very low. The average in the last test was 12.

There was no noticeable impact on the categories : visiting websites, downloading software and copying data (all those received a score of 1). There was a slight impact for installing and running programs with a score of 2.

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