AV-TEST: Microsoft Defender, Kaspersky, Malwarebytes, Norton, can hog Windows PCs

A couple of days ago, we covered AV-Comparatives' latest report about web threat protection. The firm found that some of the popular vendors' products like Microsoft Defender, and Kaspersky, among several others, had regressed in terms of performance compared to last time.

Like AV-Comparatives, AV-TEST, which is another anti-malware assessment company, has also published its latest findings recently. The new report, as usual, evaluates various anti-malware solutions in terms of Protection, Performance, and Usability.

Overall, despite being amongst fairly popular anti-virus products, Malwarebytes scored the lowest in the protection category, when compared to other popular anti-malware solutions like Avast/AVG, Microsoft Defender, and Kaspersky, among others, as it scored 5.5 out of 6 points.

You can view the scores obtained in terms of percentages as well as out of 6 points in each of the three categories, and also the certificates awarded to each product, in the two images below (click on them to zoom):

The reason for the lower score seems to be its failure to perform as well as the others against 0-day samples. AV-TEST notes that Malwarebytes scored lower than the industry average of 99.6% detection rate at 98.5% and 99.6% in May and June 2023 tests respectively.

Speaking of Malwarebytes, another area where it seems to suffer is in system resource utilization at least in one of the tested scenarios. In the Performance section of the test, which measures the "average influence of the product on computer speed in daily usage", the software was clocked in at 17% in the "Slower launch of standard software applications" sub-category in May 2023. To Malwarebytes' credit though, the June result is much better as it was down to nearly half at just 9% which is right around the industry average of 10%.

Others like Defender, Kaspersky, and Norton, among others. also exhibited some of these symptoms under specific circumstances. Kaspersky for example was really slow when "launching popular websites" as it was at 20% in both May and June as compared to the industry-average of 14%.

Microsoft Defender, interestingly, was really bad in the "installation of frequently-used applications" while at the same time, it was outstanding in the "launch of standard software applications" category. As you can see in the image below, Microsoft's product was at 17% in May 2023 and got worse at 21% in June, against the industry average of 14%. Norton exhibited similar behavior with 24% and 20% in May and June respectively.

In case you are wondering about the winners, the best performances were put up Avast/AVG, McAfee, and Bitdefender. You can find the full test results and details on this page on AV-TEST's website.

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