Norton stumbled a bit in the labs' July-September 2020 tests, however, letting through one piece of malware to compromise the test system. Kaspersky and McAfee were perfect at both. Yet Norton neutralized one piece of malware after installation without blocking it outright, and also misclassified 6% of benign websites and pieces of software as possibly malicious. In the October-December 2020 sets of tests run by London-based SE Labs (opens in new tab), both Norton and Kaspersky detected every piece of malware. Latest test results as of January 2021 Malware detection rates

The latter's malware-detection engine may be better tuned. The tables were turned in the July-October 2020 tests, in which Kaspersky averaged 99.7% detection to Norton's 99.5%īut Norton got a total of 72 false positives over the course of 2020, while Kaspersky had just two. Norton detected an average of 100% of malware from February through May 2020, ahead of Kaspersky's 99.9%. The two brands jockeyed for the lead in evaluations run by Austrian lab AV-Comparatives (opens in new tab) in 2020. (Norton's false-positive rate has been going down.)

Only Kaspersky matched those numbers (and broke its winning streak in the same month), although Kaspersky's malware engine was arguably better 'tuned' as it picked up only eight false-positive detections over that three-year period compared with Norton's 35. Norton detected every instance of known 'widespread' malware in every monthly evaluation conducted by German lab AV-Test (opens in new tab) from January 2017 through December 2020. Its otherwise perfect winning streak against previously unseen 'zero-day' malware was marred by a single miss in April 2020, when it got a 99.5% detection rate.

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