April 30th, Qihoo 360 received comments from its industry partners with allegation of inappropriate behaviour on the benchmarking processes in test labs. We regret that this behaviour has resulted into such comments from these labs, who we recognize as reference for security benchmarking. However, we hereby offer our perspective to the alleged comments.

The allegation highlights that the default configuration of the product available for the public, differs from the configuration used by the labs for testing. This configuration was explicitly declared upon submission of the tests, and was thereafter confirmed by the test labs.

In the public version, 3rd party engine is off by default, in the consideration that the majority of our users, are running on lower computing power. To satisfy lab conditions, the consideration of power constraint was therefore discarded. In any case, no alleged comment indicates that the level of protection from the product, is lower than the records achieved during the testing sessions.

Qihoo is committed to provide free security solutions, in order to convert security a commodity for all PC users. In addition, our product offers multiple engines, and regardless of the initial configuration, it is the user who has the complete freedom to choose how many of them should be activated at any time. It is with such understanding that AV-Test, one of the three testing labs involved, has stated that further investigation is ongoing, and will provide further updates on this topic.