Microsoft Defender gets outperformed easily by rivals Avast, AVG, and Avira in latest test

Anti-malware evaluation firm AV-Comparatives has released its latest report for real-world protection. This report is a follow-up to the previous testing conducted by the company in April-May. Sadly for Microsoft, AV-Comparatives has found that Defender actually managed to get worse this time around.

For those unaware, the real-world protection test in AV-Comparatives' suite is meant to assess the protection capabilities of an anti-malware solution in an online scenario when the system is interacting with the web.

In terms of scores, Microsoft Defender has a 99% block rate which has remained unchanged since last time. And just like last time, the user-dependent compromises was 0% implying the real compromise rate is once again 1%. However, in terms of false positives, Defender managed to get worse. In the last test, Microsoft had detected 0 false positives but this time, that number has increased to two.

Meanwhile, rival anti-virus makers like Avast, AVG, Avira, and Total AV put up the best show in the test as each of them improved tremendously compared to last time.

It is a little surprising to see Defender doing so poorly in the false positives department. This is because Microsoft had announced, back in March, that it was working on improving false positive detections, just a day after if had flagged its own Office updates as malicious. And while it's difficult to improve from apparent perfection with 0 false positive alerts in past tests, to get worse at it from there is somewhat perplexing.

Source: AV-Comparatives

Microsoft Defender gets outperformed easily by rivals Avast, AVG, and Avira in latest test