Microsoft Windows Live OneCare came on last place from a  group of 17 antivirus programs tested against hundreds of thousands of worms, viruses, Trojan horses and other malware, an Austrian antivirus researcher reported.

The AV Comparatives Web site, which is maintained by Andreas Cleminti from Innsbruck, Austria, posts periodically results of tests that puts antivirus products against a list of about half a million individual pieces of malware.

The first place was won according to Cleminti's tests, by G Data Security's AntiVirusKit (AVK), which detected 99.5% of the malware. AEC's TrustPort AV WS comes on the second place with 99.4%. Other antiviruses:  Avira's AntiVir PE Premium, at 98.9%, MicroWorld's eScan Anti-Virus, at 97.9%, F-Secure's Anti-Virus, at 97.9%, and Kaspersky Labs' AV, which stopped 97.9% of the malicious code.

Better known products such as Symantec Norton AntiVirus and McAfee VirusScan took care of 96.8% and 91.6%, respectively from the malicious code. Live OneCare, which was launched last year, detected just 82.4% of the malware.

The company also tested the 17 products against polymorphic viruses, those which can produce vast variants. "The results of the polymorphic test are of importance because they how flexible an anti-virus scan engine is and how good the detection quality of complex viruses is," Cleminti said.

Only Symantec Norton AntiVirus and ESET NOD32 AntiVirus detected every variant of the 12 polymorphic families, he said. In that test, OneCare placed 15th, detecting every version of only two families, and missing seven of the polymorphic families completely.
Last week the Australian security company PC Tools released their research that claimed Windows Defender detected just 46% to 53% of spyware. Defender is a part of Windows Vista but is also available as a free download for Windows XP.

"We are looking closely at the methodology and results of the test to ensure that Windows Live OneCare performs better in future tests," a Microsoft replied.

You can download from here Cleminti's report about detection of malicious software.

written by Cristian L.