Bitdefender

Bitdefender grew out of Softwin, a Bucharest software house that Florin and Măriuca Talpeș started in 1990. The antivirus product was first called AVX and took its current name in 2001, when it became a brand of its own. It is one of the few Eastern European security vendors that has never had to justify itself to Western governments, which is more than Kaspersky can say.

Much of the business is invisible: the detection engine is licensed to other vendors, so users who think they are running a competitor's product are often scanning with Bitdefender under the hood. The rest is consumer protection and EDR for businesses, where independent tests tend to place it near the top.