Why AV-Comparatives named ESET HOME Security Essential its Product of the Year and what it means for home users

ESET HOME Security Essential delivers not only outstanding protection of digital life, but also is recognized as the perfect blend of simplicity, advanced customization for tech-savvy users, and low impact on device performance. 

What makes software perfect? Be it an email service, a video editor, a shopping app, or even a video game… First and foremost, it should be outstanding in doing what it is designed to do, right? That’s true, but not the whole story.

On 20 February, ESET was honored with AV-Comparatives’ Product of the Year 2024 Award for ESET HOME Security Essential at AV-Comparatives’ Awards Ceremony. This award is a result of more than 30 years of ESET experience and its efforts to deliver the best cyber protection for home users.

What makes the AV-Comparatives award particularly intriguing is the reviewers’ broad focus on multiple aspects of the assessed cybersecurity solutions. Leaving no stone unturned, they checked anti-malware capabilities, performance, overall user experience, and support across a series of tests in 2024.

Let’s take a look at how ESET HOME Security protects users against both laboratory and real-life scenarios, how it affects the protected device, and why it is so user-friendly.

ESET HOME Security Essential excelled across several protection tests, including AV-Comparatives’ Real-World Protection Test, Malware Protection Test, and Advanced Threat Protection Test. What does this mean for users? It proves that ESET can protect them from hundreds of thousands of threats trying to compromise their devices from a variety of entry points.

See for yourself:

Real-World Protection Test – This test aims to simulate real-world conditions users experience every day while browsing the Internet. Antivirus products are tested against hundreds of malicious URLs. Testers also note any required human interactions, i.e. blocking/allowing detected samples to execute.

Malware Protection Test – While in the Real-World Protection Test the gateway to a tested device is the web, in the Malware Protection Test the vectors can be, for example, network drives or USBs – or they cover scenarios in which the malware is already on the disk.

Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) Test – Also known as the Enhanced Real-World Test, this examination uses penetration techniques that allow attackers to target specific external computer systems, and it evaluates how well security products protect against such attacks. This test also evaluates protection against targeted advanced threats such as exploits and fileless attacks.

The Advanced Threat Protection Test also acknowledges the ESET prevention-first approach, where our technology is configured to stop attacks before they happen. To that end, half of the blocked malware samples (7 of 15) were stopped in their pre-execution phase, i.e. before the threat had run and was still inactive on the system.

This protection is not theoretical. ESET detection engines have discovered and stopped many advanced threats such as Lumma Stealer. Sold on the dark web, this infostealer malware mostly targets cryptocurrency wallets, user credentials, and two-factor authentication browser extensions. It also tries to exfiltrate other data from compromised machines and can spread in multiple ways, including cracked installations of popular open-source and paid apps such as ChatGPT or Vegas Pro. 

The real magic behind this “product of the year” is not only making it effective, but ensuring those capabilities don’t significantly slow down the protected device or overwhelm users with false alarms.

Creating security capable of catching malware at every step of its deployment process is one thing (and there can be hundreds of those steps), but it takes a number of real experts to finetune it to effectively block malware without impacting the processes of legitimate software or triggering false alarms. To ensure that the products tested didn’t suffer from these issues, AV-Comparatives’ reviewers also checked for false positives while  products are in their default settings. “False positives can cause as much trouble as a real infection” reads the AV-Comparatives summary report.

ESET HOME Security Essential won the silver medal in the False Positives category as testers detected altogether only 15 false positives during all tests run in 2024. To compare, some other tested solutions produced around 30 false positives in a single test.  

On top of that, ESET was also awarded for low system-impact while testers performed usual user procedures such as file copying, installing applications, or browsing websites.

Read the full AV-Comparatives’ Summary Report 2024.

When considering what the best software should look like, the critical part is user experience. And what did AV-Comparatives have to say about ESET HOME Security Essential?

“Reviewers were impressed by the clean, intuitive user interface designed for non-expert users, as well as extensive customization and scan options available for power users.”

They describe ESET HOME Security Essential as a well-designed and easy-to-use security product providing safe default settings and a clean, intuitive interface for non-expert users, where essential features like “help” and access-control are easily accessible. For power users, the settings dialog has plenty of advanced options, including excellent access-control.

In this way, ESET HOME Security Essential can perfectly serve both average Joes and tech-savvy home admins.

Learn more about ESET HOME Security solutions here.

So, what makes a software perfect? Perfect software seamlessly combines functionality, usability, and reliability. It addresses user needs effectively, providing intuitive and user-friendly interfaces that enhance the overall experience.

Having a cyber security solution with all these attributes is especially important when we are talking about protecting your data, identity, and finances. ESET HOME Security Essential is all-in-one protection for your digital life, and ESET is proud to say that it has triumphed as AV-Comparatives´ 2024 Product of the Year.