In a recent test from AV-Test, Microsoft’s popular and free antivirus program, Security Essentials, received a very poor score. Security Essentials scored second to last in a test that tested 22 different anti-virus programs.
As PCWorld reports, Microsoft free and popular antivirus program received a poor score when compared to 22 other anti-virus programs.
Here are the results of the test:
- Spotting malware drawn from the industry-agreed Wildlist selection – 100%
- Detection of recent malware samples – 97%
- Detection of 107 recent zero-day malware web and email malware attacks – 50%
- Dynamic detection testing – 45%
- Test average for real-world testing – 84%
- Test average for dynamic testing – 62%
Microsoft’s Security Essentials was awarded a ‘pass’ certification at the end of the test.
“Microsoft is offering a free of charge virus scanner: MSE. The product is missing effective email and web protection and also dynamic detection/protection technologies, so the product performs worse when compared with other free or paid AV/ISS offering. That’s the big problem with this tool – the majority of the other products tested includes such protection features, so they are performing better in our tests. And we expect that they are performing better in the ‘real world’ as well, which is the focus of our tests,” said Andreas Marx of AV-Test.
If you are wondering what antivirus software came out on top, BitDefender’s Internet Security Suite 2011 won the test while BullGuard Internet Security 10 and F-Secure Internet Security 2011 round out the top 3. Microsoft’s Security Essentials, however, beat out CA Internet Security Suite 2011 in tests.
Microsoft has claimed that the software has been installed on nearly 31 million PCs globally as of September 2010. Security Essentials v2 was released in December of 2010 and hopefully we see better improvements in the software as it becomes more and more popular.
Click here to view the test results.
