Microsoft Flunks Antivirus Tests. Who Aced Them?

[Christopher1]

With all due respect, no, Windows Defender and MSE are NOT meant to be stop-gap solutions.... or at least they were not meant to be at FIRST. Guess why Microsoft now says that they are supposed to be that?
Because the paid antivirus companies moaned and bitched about Microsoft making their own free solution, saying that it would be 'uncompetitive actions' to actually make their OS harder to infiltrate for malware.

 

[deksman]

Like some other people, I've been using MSE since its inception and to this day I hadn't had any virus issues... and neither did those on whose computers I installed it.
I also educated people not to just click on everything and use adblock when surfing.
I actually visit shady websites and manage to avoid viruses.

As for malware... that's a different story.
MSE is a relatively pure antivirus... for malware, you need a competent anti-malware... in which case, I personally use Malwarebytes (free edition).

This kind of combination works for me, and has a minimal impact on virtually any system.
Plus, I've encountered computers using newest version of Norton AV for instance, even McAfee... and all of them had some kind of a viral issue which those programs couldn't detect... plus those programs notably slowed their computers.
Once I replaced them with MSE, it found and removed those infections... while the malware was dealt with Malwarebytes (something that neither Norton or McAfee could detect, let alone remove).

So, I find these claims dubious at best.

If they are indicative of 0 day attacks... then very few programs will be able to deal with that... MSE granted is bad with those, but smart internet use such as implementation of adblock and HTTPS everywhere extensions provide a good degree of protection - but it also hinges on the person to not click on all ads and various stuff which is usually a conduit to most software infections (irrespective of the AV you use).

 

[JackNaylorPE]

People mistakenly think that their security is as good as their security habits .... a bad assumption. Your security is only as good as the habits of every web site manager at the sites you download files from and every person who sends you attachments. I have found infected file in e-mail attachments, in free as well as commercial software upgrades and in on-line file libraries.... and yes trusted sites. When I served as a Compuserve Wizop, we oft had files pass a virus scan by one program only to be caught by another hence the double scan rule.

Microsoft Defender and SE provide a bare minimum of protection. While when I am asked to clean a machine, I see many levels of infection, the record was over 1200 and this was with a machine using MS protection. The machine belonged to a teacher whose students submitted homework by e-mail.

http/www.av-comparatives.org/summary-reports/

"The following vendors participated in AV-Comparatives’ public main test-series of 2013 and agreed to have the effectiveness of their products independently evaluated. Microsoft ***asked*** to be included in the tests, but to be regarded as a ***baseline*** and not as competition to the other products. "

If you think software can't detect 0 day attacks, read up about hueristic scanning and 0 day is not 0 day anymore the third day it's been out .... the better vendors usually have signatures for these by then, others don't....any every vendor gets caught short every now and then.

The most common infections I am asked to clean come from peeps who clicked on a "Free AV scan" or "download free AV software" link.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

http/chart.av-comparatives.org/chart1.php?chart=chart2&year=2014&month=12&sort=0&zoom=2

 

[dthx]

Our company used to run Kaspersky. It was slowing down the machines and a pain to administer (new OS support always came in very late), catastrophic to uninstall (the uninstaller doesn't always work and can sometimes leave your PC without keyboard/mouse support due to upperfilters entries left by the uninstaller ... then you must play with the registry to clean-up those entries).
We switched to the only antivirus which does not appear in this test: Sophos. We were pretty shocked to see what kind of garbage Sophos found on the computers of many users once we migrated. Kaspersky ... never again.

 

[beayn]

In my personal experience, this list is pretty backwards. I've had good luck with avast finding infections on client machines that other AV's won't find. Particularly McAfee won't find a shitton of stuff that avast will. ESET has also had an excellent track record of finding infections. I use their free online scanner all the time to clean up infected machines.

McAfee has been probably the worst both for detection and for causing problems that render the computer useless or cuts off internet access requiring the consumer product removal tool be used and a reset of the TCP IP stack to repair.

BitDefender has also caused problems... and the person who praised TrendMicro maybe doesn't realize that AV software has a dismal detection rate (in my experience with real world infections) and also has 9+ executable files running that all access various sites on the internet.

My company also runs a wireless ISP and we had issues with massive bandwidth consumption from a client who was unaware of it. It was bringing down an entire backhaul. I was sent to find out what it was, and discovered it was Trend Micro with its 9 exe files all accessing various IP addresses and sending corrupted packets over the network that was causing routing issues.

I uninstalled the AV manually since nobody knew the uninstall password, and it solved the issue.