NEWS: Major antivirus vendors fail industry-standard VB100 Antivirus Benchmark

Posted by: kurtsh | August 10, 2009

NEWS: Major antivirus vendors fail industry-standard VB100 Antivirus Benchmark

Take a look at this article from The Register summarizing the recent VB100 Antivirus test results:

Top vendors flunk Vista anti-virus tests
Outstandingly mediocre
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/06/vista_anti_virus_tests/

“Security vendors including CA and Symantec failed to secure Windows systems without fault in recent independent tests… Twelve of the 35 anti-virus products put through their paces by independent security certification body Virus Bulletin failed to make the grade for one reason or another and therefore failed to achieve the VB100 certification standard.”

“Microsoft’s new Forefront security scanner came out well in these proactive categories, a factor Hawes attributed to the effort Microsoft has thrown into improving the performance of its technology over recent months”

Microsoft Forefront Passes VB100
What they’re referring to in that last sentence (“Forefront security scanner”) is the MSAV engine, which is in Forefront Client Security (now known as Forefront Endpoint Protection), Microsoft Security Essentials, Forefront Server products, etc. It’s consistently come out in the very top tier of anti-malware products for the Enterprise, particularly for its “proactive detection ability” or it’s ability to recognize threats that are not yet defined or are undetectable through malware signatures, with as few false positives as possible.