Which is the best AV Engine? How much does it cost?

TopTen Reviews got us quite a practical answer. This year, BitDefender, Kaspersky and ESET Nod32 have made it to the top 3 podium (respectively).

The top 10 known AV engines were rated over six different areas:

Ease of Use, Effectiveness, Updates, Feature Set, Ease of Installation and most importantly Help/Support. BitDefender and Kaspersky both got a perfect score in all areas. The features that made Kaspersky fall to 1st runner up position were: cost difference and the registry startup protection feature that it lacks.

The Computer Crime and Security Survey 2006 states that although 97% of PCs are protected by an anti-virus solution, 65% were affected by a virus at some point. I frequently ask this question “Is one AV Engine enough?“. Some small business and enterprise solutions have already started bulking a couple of AV engines in a solution, GFI Software Ltd. for example, already have 5 engines for GFI MailSecurity 10 for Exchange/SMTP and 3 other engines for GFI WEBmonitor 4 for ISA Server.

What I’m asking is:

• Will this soon evolve up to a certain point to be a requirement for home users?
• Are viruses growing out of hand?
• Are people educated enough to be able to cope with the functionality of these products?
• Are different levels of users considered when designing new products?