Elastic achieves perfect score in AV-Comparatives 2026 test: 100% malware protection

Elastic excels in AV-Comparatives test with perfect score

Cybersecurity teams face an apparently impossible responsibility: ensuring absolute threat prevention without impacting performance or generating false positives. Many vendors promise ready-to-use protections, but only independent testing organizations provide the rigorous, real-scenario-based evaluations needed to verify whether a platform can actually achieve this goal without specific customizations.

AV-Comparatives has just published the first semi-annual report of its Business Security Test 2026, covering the test period from March to June 2026. Among the 16 business solutions tested on fully updated Windows 11, Elastic Security was the only one to achieve a 100% malware protection rate and to rank in the top tier for real-world protection, earning the AV-Comparatives Approved Business Product Award. At the heart of this result is Elastic Defend, the native endpoint protection solution integrated in Elastic Security.

Elastic unique with 100% in malware protection test

The malware protection test simulates a scenario that any company might face: malware already present on the disk or arriving via LAN or removable drives, rather than directly from a website. AV-Comparatives ran 1,000 recent malware samples against each product, scanning on access and then executing any sample that passed through, allowing behavioral defenses to react. Elastic emerged at the top, being the only vendor with a perfect score, as stated by AV-Comparatives:

Elastic Security achieved a perfect score of 100% in our malware protection test, the best result in the entire field in this cycle.

Andreas Clementi, CEO, AV-Comparatives

The difference between 99% and 100% may seem small on paper, but it is not; at enterprise scale, that one sample out of a hundred is the one that can become an incident, a support request, and, in the worst case, a breach. And Elastic achieved this result with zero false alarms on common business software, exactly the balance that the test is designed to reward.

Elastic at the top for real-world protection

The real-world protection test is the most demanding, simulating what a business user actually encounters during browsing, such as malicious URLs, drive-by exploits, and socially engineered downloads. This test allows every level of the product to intervene at any stage: URL blocking, download inspection, behavioral analysis, and memory protection. The test was conducted continuously from March to June 2026 on 400 test cases and is the closest to simulating real scenarios in the lab.

Elastic Security achieved the highest score and blocked 399 of the 400 threats, with a protection rate of 99.8% along with two other vendors.

Taken together, the two protection tests tell a consistent story: Elastic Security intercepted everything thrown at it in the malware test and everything but one case in the real-world protection test, placing it above every other business vendor in the field, including the names that most organizations already have on their shortlist.

Security market

The AV-Comparatives results come at a crucial time for the cybersecurity market. According to recent analyses, the global cybersecurity sector is expected to exceed $300 billion by 2024, with an annual growth rate of 12%. This expansion is driven by the proliferation of sophisticated threats, the increase in ransomware attacks, and the need for integrated solutions that can manage the complexity of modern IT environments.

Elastic Security emerges in this context as a particularly relevant solution for organizations seeking to balance advanced protection and operational simplicity. The ability of Elastic Defend to achieve a perfect score in the malware protection test, while maintaining excellent performance, positions it as a strategic choice for companies that need to manage heterogeneous and continuously evolving infrastructures.

Architecture and flexibility of Elastic Security

One of the most distinctive aspects of Elastic Security is its modular architecture and ability to adapt to different infrastructure configurations. The solution supports hybrid deployments, allowing organizations to maintain operational continuity even in environments with limited or isolated connectivity.

This flexibility is particularly valuable for highly regulated sectors such as healthcare, utilities, and finance, where the protection of sensitive data is critical. Elastic Security also offers native integrations with numerous third-party tools, allowing organizations to leverage their existing investments in security and monitoring.

Optimizing security operations

Reducing alert fatigue is a priority for modern security teams. Elastic Security addresses this challenge through several features:

• Centralized policy management: allows defining and applying consistent rules to all endpoints
• Trusted application lists: enable excluding known and safe internal tools from intensive monitoring
• Endpoint exceptions: provide a flexible mechanism for handling special cases without compromising overall security

These tools not only improve operational efficiency but also reduce the risk of missing real threats due to excessive alert noise.

Future perspectives and roadmap

Elastic continues to invest in the development of its security platform, with a particular focus on integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve threat detection and automated response. Planned features include:

• Improvements in behavioral analysis algorithms
• Expansion of advanced attack detection capabilities
• Performance optimization on next-generation hardware

These developments aim to keep Elastic Security at the forefront of endpoint protection, adapting to the evolution of cyber threats.

Final considerations

The AV-Comparatives test results confirm that Elastic Security represents a complete and high-performance solution for endpoint protection. The combination of excellent prevention capabilities, optimized performance, and operational flexibility makes it particularly suitable for the needs of modern organizations that must face an ever-evolving threat landscape.

For companies seeking to strengthen their security posture without compromising operational efficiency, Elastic Security offers a valid and independently verified option. The ability to start a free trial period represents an ideal opportunity to directly evaluate the benefits of the platform.