14 DAY TRIAL // Windows Live OneCare, Microsoft's one-size-fits-all solution is no longer the laughingstock of the security industry. Back in the first quarter of 2007, following the release of Windows Live OneCare 1.5 which accompanied Windows Vista to the market, Microsoft's antivirus managed to drastically underperform in a test put together by AV-Comparatives. At that time, OneCare came dead last in all the tests run by AV-Comparatives, receiving no certification from the Austrian antivirus lab.
But, Microsoft has been hammering away at OneCare taking it to version 1.6 and then to 2.0, and constantly improving the antivirus. In mid 2007, OneCare scored a lot higher in another AV-Comparatives test, and this trend is accentuating. Case in point: the latest test made available by AV-Comparatives at the end of November 2007. The antivirus lab has thrown together in the same arena no less than 17 security solutions, in a test involving false positives and both the proactive and retrospective on-demand detection capabilities of the products.
"Many new viruses and other types of malware appear every day, this is why it's important that antivirus products not only provide new updates, as of then as fast as possible, in order to identify those new threats, but also that they are able to detect such threats in advance with generic and/or heuristic techniques. (...) Even if nowadays most antivirus products provide daily or hourly updates, without heuristic/generic methiods there is always a time-frame where the user is not protected, and much more important than time to release an update, is the time it takes to get that update deployed", revealed Andreas Clementy, the head of the AV-Comparatives lab.
The following solutions were tested: Avast! Professional Edition 4.7; AVG Anti-Malware 7.5; Avira AntiVir Personal Edition Premium 7.04; BitDefender Professional Plus 10; Dr.Web for Windows 4.44.1; eScan Anti-Virus 9.0; ESET NOD32 Anti-Virus 2.70.39; Fortinet FortiClient 3.0; F-Prot for Windows 6.0.7.1; F-Secure Anti-Virus 7.01; G DATA AntiVirusKit (AVK) 17.0; Kaspersky Anti-Virus 7.0.0; McAfee VirusScan 11.2; Microsoft OneCare 1.6; Norman Virus Control 5.91; Symantec Norton Anti-Virus 14.0 and TrustPort Antivirus Workstation 1.4.2. The good news for Microsoft is that OneCare is not only not finishing up in last place any more, but that the product is actually outperforming rival solutions from heavyweights of the security market.
Windows Live OneCare 1.6.2111.30 detected no less than 8.807 malware samples out of a total of 25.036 malicious items, and received a score of 35% and the Advanced Certification from AV-Test. OneCare outperformed Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus 14.0.3.3 with just 8.733 detections, NormanVirusControl (8.234), McAfee VirusScan (8.488), F-Secure Anti-Virus (3.473), F-Prot Anti-Virus (8.346) and AVG Anti-Malware (6.249). But at the same time, OneCare was virtually left in the dust by Kaspersky AV 7.0.0.125 (10.125 ? 40%) and NOD32 Anti-Virus 2.70.39 (17.687 ? 71%), the sole security products to get an Advanced+ certification.