OneCare Finishes Last in Antivirus Test
Windows Live OneCare from Microsoft competed with 17 antivirus software applications in a test against nearly half a million viruses, Trojans, worms, and other malware, according to Austrian antivirus researcher Andreas Clementi.
Clementi posts results of tests of top antivirus products on his AV Comparatives Web site (www.av-comparatives.org). G Data Security’s AntiVirusKit blocked 99.5 percent of the malicious threats. AEC’s TrustPort AV WS, Anvira’s AntiVir PE Premium, MicroWorld’s eScan AntiVirus, F-Secure’s Anti-Virus, and Kaspersky Labs’ AV also impresively succedeed high marks.
However, big-brand solutions such as Norton AntiVirus from Symantec and McAfee’s VirusScan could not keep up to the competition. Symantec’s software scored 96.8 while McAfee scored 91.6. And Microsoft’s OneCare blocked only 82.4 percent of malicious software.
This represents a very interesting issue, why pay more for a high-brand security solution, if that proved to be a weak piece of software?How could this be explained?
Well, in his report, Clementi suggested that end users should keep in their minds that the detection rate is only one aspect of a complete antivirus product. He also offered some additional factors to consider, including looking into other independent test results.
“We encourage our readers to also have a look at tests done by other test centers with large collections of verified malware,” he noted, “as tests based solely on viruses listed on the Wildlist give a fairly limited view of the detection capabilities.”
This is not the only test that has found Microsoft’s security software as inadequate. In other test, Microsoft’s antispyware tool, Windows Defender, also dissapointed,performing very poor. Australian security company PC Tools - which makes and sells its own antispyware product - the popular and powerful Spyware Doctor tool ( as the most recent reviews show ) - found Windows Defender to detect only between 46 percent and 53 percent of the spyware thrown at it. This is a black ,,spot” for Microsoft, I even wonder if Windows Defender was a garbage piece of software or Microsoft,s so said recent interest for a real security software policy is just a complex of empty words.
Antivirus goes down
According to Michael Sutton, a security specialist with SPI Dynamics, the downfall of current antivirus products results from the fact that they are especially signature-based. Hard-coded signatures rely on exact matches before they trigger, he explained, and malware writers have realized that even simple mutations can bypass signature-based algorithms.
The only antivirus software that little exceeded 50% proactive detection of unknown/undiscovered malware software to the last test of Clementi (in november 2006) were Antivir PE Premium, from Avira and NOD32, from Eset. Eset has been being for quite a time well known for its heuristic proved capabilities, but even so, the day when every new created virus to be automatically detected without updated signatures is still far even for them, not to talk about the other companies which don,t have a too good know-how technology in this respect.
Source: http://www.topix.net/tech/spyware
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