Germany warns against the use of Kaspersky antivirus

While the Defender antivirus built into Windows offers reasonable protection, there are also reliable options among the many free protection programs offered on the network. This is the conclusion reached by the German product evaluation and consumer assistance organization Stiftung Warentest in a comparison of 20 paid and free antiviruses. The results were published in issue 3/22 of his magazine “test”.

The best free antivirus in the test was Kaspersky Security Cloud Free. The program ranked third in the overall standings and is only one-tenth worse than the paid version of the same company, which came out the winner of the test.

However, due to the war in Ukraine and the associated danger of cyberattacks, Germany's Federal Office for Information Technology Security (BSI) is now warning against the use of antivirus software from the Russian manufacturer Kaspersky. Users who have installed software from this vendor should replace it with alternative products.

Stiftung Warentest also rated the following three free solutions as “good”: Avast Free Antivirus, AVG Antivirus Free and Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition. The latter is no longer available for download.

While Windows Defender is the latest antivirus program in comparison to the others, it still gets a “satisfactory” as a result.

Kaspersky, for its part, stressed in a statement that, as a private company, it had “no link with the Russian Government or any other”. The provider added that it has moved its data processing infrastructure to Switzerland: “We assure our partners and customers of the quality and integrity of our products and will work with BSI to clarify the decision and respond to the concerns of this entity or other regulatory bodies.”

dpa