WithSecure media relations
WithSecure PR
Independent testing confirms unified detection, AI-assisted correlation and a European delivery model hold up against 50 real-world attack chains.
Helsinki, Finland – September 15, 2026: WithSecure today announced that WithSecure Elements XDR has achieved Certified Leader status in AV-Comparatives’ 2026 Endpoint Prevention and Response (EPR) Test, the highest distinction the independent testing body awards. The result places WithSecure among just 11 of 14 enterprise security vendors to clear this year’s certification bar.
The EPR Test doesn’t check for known malware signatures. It runs full attack chains the way a real adversary would: phishing entry, privilege escalation, lateral movement, and data theft, built on techniques from the MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise framework. In 2026, AV-Comparatives raised the required combined Active/Passive Response score from 90% to 92% and introduced more advanced, AI-assisted attack scenarios to reflect how attacker tooling is evolving.
WithSecure Elements XDR prevented 100% of the scenarios, containing every attack scenario before it reached the asset-breach phase – and did so with zero additional operational cost from false positives or workflow delays. The test also measured early active and passive response rates during the initial phase of attacks, resulting in 96.0% and 98.7%, respectively.
“WithSecure Elements XDR achieved Certified Leader status in the AV-Comparatives EPR Test 2026,” said Andreas Clementi, Founder & CEO of AV-Comparatives. “Every attack scenario in our test was ultimately contained before it could reach the asset breach phase, and the product did so without generating any additional operational accuracy costs. It is a clean, reliable result that reflects well on WithSecure’s enterprise XDR approach.”
A result built on more than one test
This is the first Certified Leader result under the WithSecure name, but not the company’s first time earning it. As F-Secure Business it was certified in AV-Comparatives’ EPR Test back in 2021, giving this year’s result a five-year track record behind it.
WithSecure attributes the outcome to Broad Context Detection™, which pulls signals from endpoints, identities and cloud into a single incident view, mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, and correlated by WithSecure Luminen™ AI layer. The company also points to its European base: Elements XDR is developed, delivered and supported from Europe, a factor increasingly relevant to public-sector and data-residency-sensitive organizations navigating regulation such as NIS2 and DORA.
“Independent results like this matter because they’re not ours to grade,” said TL Viswanathan, Chief Product Officer, WithSecure. “AV-Comparatives put fourteen enterprise products through fifty real attack chains, and our platform contained every one of them without adding noise for the teams running it. That’s the whole point of building one platform instead of stitching several together: less to manage, and nothing missed. It’s also a strong signal for the MSPs and enterprises building their security operations on top of us – the platform holds up under the kind of pressure their own customers actually face.”
About the test
AV-Comparatives’ Endpoint Prevention and Response (EPR) Test evaluates enterprise security products against realistic, multi-stage attack scenarios rather than static malware samples. The CyberRisk Quadrant derived from the test includes only products that clear the Certified Leader threshold, making every product shown a top-tier result. Full details of the 2026 test are available at av-comparatives.org, with WithSecure’s product-specific report available directly from AV-Comparatives.