Microsoft’s antivirus solution Live OneCare has come last in a test of 17 antivirus products by Austrian anti-virus researcher Andreas Cleminti of AV Comparitives. In February LiveOneCare was slammed by Virus Bulletin after it failed a series of test required to achieve VB100 certification.

Last week a test by independent lab Enex TestLab, found that Microsoft’s Windows Defender was only able to block 47% of spyware threats in quick scan mode, and 53% of threats in full scan mode.

These test results paint a grim picture for Microsoft’s security program, which try as it might, just doesn’t seem to be able to keep up with the competition.

Cleminti tests antivirus programs on a quarterly basis, in which he tests each product against around 500,000 worms, Trojan horses, viruses, and other malware.

G Data Security’s AntiVirusKit (AVK) came top in Cleminti’s test, being able to deal with 99.5% of the malware that was thrown at it. In second place was AEC’s TrustPort AV WS (99.4%), while Avira’s AntiVir PE Premium came in third (98.9%).

The well known Symantec Norton Antivirus came sixth (96.9%), while McAfee VirusScan came 14th (91.6%). Microsoft’s Live OneCare came in last at 16th (82.4%), well after Dr Web Anti-Virus, which came second last (89.3%).

Live OneCare was the only product that performed so badly that it was not able to achieve any level of certification.

“It’s very disappointing to see a major product not reaching a good enough level of detection. For the sake of their customers, I hope Microsoft will be working hard to improve things and ensure OneCare offers full protection to its users,” Cleminti told Virus Bulletin.

Cleminti also tested the antivirus products with polymorphic viruses, which are viruses that automatically mutate in order to try to avoid detection. Only two products, Symantec’s Norton AntiVirus and ESET’s NO D32 antivirus, were able to detect every polymorphic variant thrown at them. In the polymorphic test, Live OneCare came second last.

The full report is available here.

A Microsoft spokesperson said that the company is looking at Cleminti’s methodology and test results to ensure that Live OneCare does better in future tests.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 at 11:53 am under Antivirus, Internet, Microsoft, Security.

Read more entries by John Pospisil.
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