In case you weren’t convinced that Microsoft has mostly given up on keeping its antivirus products competitive, the most recent results from independent lab AV-Test should hammer the point home so thoroughly you’ll be uninstalling them by the end of this sentence.
This post was originally published on Lifehacker Australia. Photo by Lydia / Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0
OK, maybe not that sentence. How about we go over the numbers first? We know Security Essentials has been lagging behind other options — including free ones — for some time and sadly, Microsoft’s enterprise offerings aren’t any better.
Image by AV-Test
As you can see in the table above, System Center Endpoint Protection ranks at the bottom and well, it’s not even close. The next best choice, Seqrite, is near-optimal (though it “slowed down the test client very noticeably”), while everything above that has 99 or 100 per cent detection rates.
Keep in mind the tests were conducting on a Windows 7 machine so your numbers could vary if you’re running 8 or 10. Not that your flavour of Windows is going to help SCEP detect threats better. Replacing it will, however.
Strong protection for corporate networks with Windows 7 [AV-Test, via NetworkWorld]
Comments
4 responses to “Microsoft Comes Last In Latest Enterprise Antivirus And Security Tests”
Same as I commented on Giz, this MS AV bashathon campaign by you guys seems out of proportion. I’m interested to know, are you being paid by any 3rd parties who have an agenda to stop people using it?
You forgot the columns with the cost and the amount of spam and hassleware each product has. In both cases Microsoft comes out last, which is why I love it.
These results are a little misleading. Third-Party AV are designed to combat threats on all versions of Windows, even ones that have never received any security updates from Microsoft. MSE doesn’t include detection of threats that have been patched out of Windows through updates. AV testing sites only use out of date versions of Windows to create a hostile environment which puts the Third-Party AVs at an unfair advantage. MSE used in conjunction with Windows updates is a very capable AV.
What are you talking about? The tests were done on Windows 7 and 8??? There is no advantage. AV and Windows patches are completely separate. AV’s uses heuristic matching to detect known malware code. If it finds something it acts. OS patching is irrelevant and if MSE is not looking for code that it thinks was patched in previous versions of Windows then it deserves to be on the bottom of the list. Antivirus is a moving target. Nothing should be assumed.