Certifications

Effitas Certifications

Each of our core certifications is the preeminent assessment in its field, and is used by security vendors, financial institutions and other corporations to determine their products’ effectiveness against the full spectrum of malware prevalent during any given testing period.

We currently have two certifications, with more planned, including a quarterly NextGen assessment.

How our certifications work

Every quarter we conduct comparative quality assessments which evaluate the reliability and efficiency of security solutions against financial or other threats.

We subject all tested software to a previously unprecedented level of testing, and provide feedback and consultation that helps all participating vendors to fine-tune, patch or improve the effectiveness of their technology.

For our core certifications, we test products over twelve months beginning in Quarter 2 and ending in Quarter 1 the following year, at which time we publish our results.

We certify any vendor software that passes a quarterly test, while any software passing all four quarterly tests receives the relevant Effitas award. It is no mean achievement to pass the Effitas Certifications, so any vendor that wins our annual award has achieved something truly significant.

Why do we assess protection software in this way?

Effitas is a consulting testing house and we exist to provide leading expertise in our field.

We ongoingly assess protection software so that end users can rest assured they are using the best available products, and so that vendors can remain as informed as possible about the threats impacting on their technology.

We can provide our assessments as a service to vendors who want to know how their technology performs against real-world threats, but we also test products independently in order to understand any disparity between protection software and the threats that exist in the wild.

Why our tests are different

Effitas’ certification tests go one step further than most existing tests because we measure the time security products take to detect infections and remediate an endpoint.

Detection rates and the time taken to detect active malware are crucially important, particularly with the diverse mix of malware in today’s threat landscape: the longer a cybercriminal can have their malware on a system, the greater the opportunity for them to capture private user information including banking passwords, social media credentials, etc.