Independent Austrian antivirus testing outfit AV Comparatives has a reputation for going the extra mile when putting products through their paces. Something that Microsoft discovered to its cost earlier in the year when, rather embarrassingly, its flagship OneCare antivirus product managed to finish last and fail to get a highly sought after AV Comparatives certification of any sort.

Things have improved for the Seattle giants since then, and in the latest round of tests for which the results have just been published, OneCare no longer languishes at the bottom of the heap. Microsoft has only moved up 3 places into 14th position, but it beat some rather well thought of names in the AV industry in so doing. In 15th place came Kaspersky Labs AV v6.02, just above Microworld eScan Antivirus 8 (which I have to admit to have never heard of before now) and the newly crowned worst antivirus product is Grisoft AVG AntiMalware v7.5 which managed to detect only 8% of new samples, returned ‘many’ false positives while registering slow for its on-demand scanning speed. A very poor result which saw it fail to get certificated, unlike Microsoft OneCare which can now claim to have reached a standard level by detecting just 18% of the 20522 new threats thrown at it. Not really that great, though, is it?

Certainly not when compared to the likes of standard certificated AVIRA AntiVir PE Premium 7 which racked up an impressive 71% detection rate although it too scored many false positives. The other product to hit that 71% detection rate failed to get certificated at all, Fortinet FortiClient 3 performed amazingly badly in this regard. While the FP range for all other products on test was between 0 (Symantec Norton Anti Virus) and 36 (Doctor Web Dr.Web 4), Fortinet rated at ‘more than 1000’ which is truly shocking.

According to security researcher Andreas Clementi at AV Comparatives, the overall winner and recipient of an Advanced+ certification with a detection rate of 68%, only 2 false positives and a fast scanning speed was ESET NOD32 AntiVirus 2.7