Microsoft Takes Narrow Lead in Antivirus Vendor Market

share coverage, the report provides a comprehensive breakdown of the most popular products in their respective category and how often certain product features are enabled.The quarterly report includes a focus on the antivirus vendor and antivirus product usage category. As shown in the report, Microsoft maintained a slight lead in the worldwide antivirus vendor market with a 26.2% share (based on users with real-time protection enabled).

Avast finished second in the report with a 23.3% market share, with AVG (9.1%), Symantec (8.4%) and ESET (7.1%) rounding out the top five. avast! Free Antivirus finished first in the worldwide market of antivirus products with a 19.5% market share. The next two spots were held by Microsoft products, Microsoft Security Essentials (18.3%) and Windows Defender (7.7%). The top ten security software products detected made up 74% of the worldwide antivirus product market share according to OPSWAT’s report.

OPSWAT’s report includes an improved data collection process compared to previous reports. For the first time, all the data in the report was collected solely from OPSWAT Security Score, a free tool that detects and assesses security applications on an endpoint and provides a numerical score. By utilizing data from Security Score, the report is able to provide the most up-to-date information about the applications installed on a user’s machine and the status of the application (e.g. whether real-time protection is enabled or disabled); OPSWAT Security Score utilizes the same technology found in OPSWAT’s GEARS Cloud, a solution that makes it easier for network administrators to detect and manage a wide range of security applications on devices in their network, including antivirus, hard disk encryption, public file sharing, and many others.

Additional market share categories included coverage of peer-to-peer and backup applications. uTorrent dominated the peer-to-peer market with more than half of the market (54.5%). BitTorrent, which is owned by the same company as uTorrent, finished in a distant second with 7.1% and Ares finished third with 6.1%. The market for backup products was much more evenly distributed compared to the public file sharing application market. Google, Dropbox, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive battled for the backup market lead, with Google’s Drive narrowly edging out the field with a 22.3% market share compared to Dropbox’s 19.5% and Microsoft’s SkyDrive’s 15.4%.

For the first time shown in OPSWAT market share reports, data was included related to antiphishing products. The report looked at the number of users who have antiphishing enabled in their web browser; 92.1% had antiphishing enabled for at least one of their installed browsers.