Microsoft OneCare - a Last and Least Anti-Virus

Microsoft's security solution OneCare 1.5 is the last and least anti-virus in a rating put together by AV Comparatives. No less than 17 anti-virus products have been evaluated by AV Comparatives, and OneCare managed to come in dead last in every test. AV Comparatives conducted three separate sets of tests, in which in excess of 1 million samples were thrown against the 17 anti-virus products.

The first two tests involved the performances of the security solutions against viruses, macros, worms, scrips, backdoors, Trojans and other malicious code. G DATA AntiVirusKit (AVK) 17.0 came on top of all anti-virus products with a total detection rate of 99.45%.

TrustPort Antivirus Workstation 2.5 is runner-up with a 99.36% detection rate, followed by AVIRA AntiVir Personal Edition Premium 7.03 with 98.85%. Microsoft OneCare only amounted to a total detection rate of 82.24%, and lagged all the security products involved in the evaluation.

F-Secure Anti-Virus 7.01, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0.2, Symantec Norton Anti-Virus 14.0, ESET NOD32 Anti-Virus 2.70.23, AVG Anti-Malware 7.5 and BitDefender Professional Plus 10 also performed fairly well, with total detection rates larger than 96%. A notable exception is McAfee VirusScan 11.1 that returned a detection rate of just 91.63%.

As of yet, the Redmond Company has failed to comment in any way the results of the independent anti-virus comparison performed by AV Comparatives. However, a Microsoft representative did reveal that the company will be looking into the methodology and results of the evaluation in order to improve OneCare's performances.