Microsoft Defender Kaspersky and McAfee: Subpar Performance in Latest Test
Microsoft Defender Kaspersky and McAfee: Subpar Performance in Latest Test
Microsoft Defender Kaspersky and McAfee: Subpar Performance in Latest Test.
Microsoft Defender, Kaspersky, and McAfee Show Subpar Performance in Latest Windows Environment Test.
The anti-malware evaluation firm AV-Comparatives has recently released its latest report, comparing various popular antivirus solutions in the market.
This assessment, known as the “Real-World Protection Test,” took place between February and March 2023, during which Microsoft Defender demonstrated remarkable performance.
The testing was conducted on 64-bit Windows 10 computers.
The Real-World Protection Test focuses on network threats, as opposed to the company’s malware protection tests, which deal with malicious software executed within the system.
However, this time, Defender’s performance showed a slight regression. In the previous test, Defender successfully blocked 99.8% of malicious test cases, but this time, the block rate dropped to 99.2%, despite the reduced number of test files. While the previous report for February to March had 520 test cases, this time there were only 254. The false positive rate decreased from two in the previous test to one, although, in terms of percentages, it may be similar due to the smaller sample size.
As explained by AV-Comparatives, the decrease in the number of test cases can be attributed to several reasons:
Over the year, we assessed thousands of malicious URLs. Unfortunately, many of these had to be abandoned for various reasons. We removed duplicate malicious software, such as the same malicious software hosted on different domain names or IP addresses, previously tested websites, “gray” or non-malicious websites/files, and malicious software/websites that disappeared during testing. Due to patch levels, many malicious URLs carrying vulnerabilities couldn’t compromise the selected systems/applications. This means that vulnerabilities in third-party applications in the system have been patched, preventing the exploitation of these vulnerabilities to deliver malicious payloads.
Apart from Defender, software from other major vendors like Kaspersky, McAfee, Bitdefender, and ESET also showed a decline compared to the previous test. Among them, Kaspersky’s performance was notably poor, as it often used to intercept 100% of cases with zero false positives.
Complete results can be found in the image below:
AV-Comparatives’ July to August 2023 Network Threat Test Results(image source: Av-Comparatives)
This time, the real standout appears to be F-Secure, which achieved a 100% block rate for all threats, although the false positive rate remained high.
The best performers were Avast and AVG, both based on the same engine, intercepting 100% of malware samples with only one false positive.
You can read the full results on this page of the AV-Comparatives website:
