SE Labs Q1 2019 Endpoint Protection: Enterprise, Small Business, and Consumer

“K7 was never notified about being included in the test. Therefore K7 was not given the option of providing a suitable product to include in the test. The tester has itself chosen the most basic K7 consumer security product, without K7’s knowledge, which is entirely unsuitable given the premise of the Test Plan. Due diligence on suitability to match the nature of the test has NOT been taken into account at all.”

“As mentioned earlier, for reasons best known to SELabs, K7’s flagship K7 Total Security product which supports robust web security was NOT chosen for this test series despite its features being best suited to the test plan executed. Instead, K7’s most basic product has been tested without providing K7 recourse to choosing to be a Participant. K7 has not even been given the preliminary test results, and hence has not had any opportunity to dispute the test results.”

Response from Test Lab: “We generally respond to requests for results from vendors rather than proactively sending them out. We do not currently have a formal relationship with K7 and so there is no existing process whereby we send data without a request. Had K7 requested this data we would have provided it as soon as possible. The product selection was made and tested before K7 communicated that it preferred its more fully-featured product to be included in such a challenging test. It is possible that the delay between our initial discussions about this and the results being published has caused confusion at K7’s end, causing the team to think that we selected Antivirus Premium after these discussions, when in fact these results are from earlier in the year. As agreed with K7 after the first stage of commentary, SE Labs has included a comment in the report that registers K7’s belief that K7 Total Security would have been a more appropriate product to include. SE Labs notes that the test includes a selection of products, many of which are free and/or considered not to be premium offerings. Therefore, while we understand K7’s preference for having a more fully-featured product undergo testing, the test is a fair comparison of a number of anti-malware products available to the public within a range of difference prices.“