AV-Comparatives, a malware testing company, recently released its latest report comparing various popular antivirus solutions on the market. Dubbed the “Real-World Protection Test,” the evaluation was last conducted in February-March 2023, where Microsoft Defender performed extremely well. It was carried out on a Windows 10 64-bit PC.
The real-world protection test deals with web threats and is different from the enterprise malware protection test, which concerns malware running on the system.
This time around however, the Defender’s performance has regressed by what can be considered a fairly significant amount. While last time Defender managed to block 99.8% of malicious test cases, this time the percentage blocked dropped to 99.2%, despite a decrease in the number of test files this time around. . In case you were wondering, the February-March report had 520 test cases while this time around there are 254. The number of false positives is down to one from two last time, although ‘in percentage it is probably similar due to the lower number of samples.
The number of test cases has decreased for several main reasons, as AV-Comparatives explains:
During the year, we evaluate tens of thousands of malicious URLs. Unfortunately, many of them have to be abandoned for various reasons. We remove duplicates such as the same malware hosted on different domains or IP addresses, already tested sites, “gray” or non-malicious sites/files, and malware/sites disappearing during testing. Many malicious URLs carrying exploits were unable to compromise the chosen system/applications due to the patch level. This means that the vulnerabilities of third-party applications present on the system were already patched and therefore the exploits could not deliver their malicious payload.
Alongside Defender, other software from major vendors like Kaspersky, McAfee, Bitdefender and ESET were also in a worse situation than last time. In particular, Kaspersky was really poor because it was able to block 100% of cases before with zero false positives.
The full result can be seen in the image below (click to zoom):
The real star of the show this time seems to be F-Secure which blocked 100% of threats while maintaining a very high number of false positives. The best of the bunch were Avast and AVG, which are both based on the same engine and blocked 100% of malware samples and had only one false positive. You can read the full results on this page of the AV-Comparatives website.
AV-Comparatives, a malware testing company, recently released its latest report comparing various popular antivirus solutions on the market. Dubbed the “Real-World Protection Test,” the evaluation was last conducted in February-March 2023, where Microsoft Defender performed extremely well. It was carried out on a Windows 10 64-bit PC.
The real-world protection test deals with web threats and is different from the enterprise malware protection test, which concerns malware running on the system.
This time around however, the Defender’s performance has regressed by what can be considered a fairly significant amount. While last time Defender managed to block 99.8% of malicious test cases, this time the percentage blocked dropped to 99.2%, despite a decrease in the number of test files this time around. . In case you were wondering, the February-March report had 520 test cases while this time around there are 254. The number of false positives is down to one from two last time, although ‘in percentage it is probably similar due to the lower number of samples.
The number of test cases has decreased for several main reasons, as AV-Comparatives explains:
During the year, we evaluate tens of thousands of malicious URLs. Unfortunately, many of them have to be abandoned for various reasons. We remove duplicates such as the same malware hosted on different domains or IP addresses, already tested sites, “gray” or non-malicious sites/files, and malware/sites disappearing during testing. Many malicious URLs carrying exploits were unable to compromise the chosen system/applications due to the patch level. This means that the vulnerabilities of third-party applications present on the system were already patched and therefore the exploits could not deliver their malicious payload.
Alongside Defender, other software from major vendors like Kaspersky, McAfee, Bitdefender and ESET were also in a worse situation than last time. In particular, Kaspersky was really poor because it was able to block 100% of cases before with zero false positives.
The full result can be seen in the image below (click to zoom):
The real star of the show this time seems to be F-Secure which blocked 100% of threats while maintaining a very high number of false positives. The best of the bunch were Avast and AVG, which are both based on the same engine and blocked 100% of malware samples and had only one false positive. You can read the full results on this page of the AV-Comparatives website.
