A real-world protection test conducted by AV-Comparatives found that Microsoft Security Essentials outperforms McAfee and that on some tests free scanners can score just as good as paid ones. The Austrian test lab AV-Comparatives tested 21 antivirus applications and internet security suites in several different tests and found these remarkable results.
Because mosts antivirus tests are conducted in labs where scanners have to detect large numbers of collected malware examples, they're not always according to reality. Therefore AV-Comparatives has its monthly 'real-world protection test' where it tests antivirus software with infected links on the internet.
When the results of August, September, October and November are combined they tested the 21 scanners with more than 1606 infected links. These links pointed to malware or tried to silently install malware through drive-by downloads, just like how systems get infected in the real world. During the tests they used the antivirus scanners and security suites with their most recent signatures.
They found that the best three scanners were from Bitdefender, Kaspersky Lab and Panda Security which all failed on one occasion. The first two ones are paid, while the last one is free.
In the tests Microsoft Security Essentials performed better than McAfee. Microsoft's virusscanner blocked 1517 threats, while McAfee stopped 1502. The scanner with the worst results was from Lavasoft, it didn't detect 154 threats.
Besides the detection of malware, the scanners were also tested for false positives. Both AVG and Kaspersky Lab scored excellent, they never falsely detected a clean link as malicious. The free Panda Security reported 17 false positives and Microsoft Security Essentials wrongly warned 29 times. The worst performer on this part of the test was Trend Micro with 49 false positives.
ThreatTrack Vipre was removed from the tests due to their bad results in both malware detection as reporting false positives.
