An Austrian web site called AV Comparatives has done an ‘independent‘ test of 17 different Anti-Virus products and released the results online.

On this site you will find independent comparatives of Anti-Virus software. All products listed in our comparatives are already a selection of some very good anti-virus products. In order to get tested by us, companies must fulfill various conditions and minimum requirements.

Several free AV products were included, you can find the test here:

http://www.av-comparatives.org/

Navigate to ‘Comparatives – On-demand comparative / February 2007′

Microsoft’s Live OneCare was the only product receiving “Standard” level results detecting a fairly low 82.40% percent of malware.

The ‘winners’ were AntiVirusKit (AVK) with 99.45% and TrustPort AV WS with 99.36%.

Most seemed to score 96-97% detection with another group around 93%.

You can see many reports and results here:

AV Comparative

You can find additional in depth reports and details here.

Today sees the launch of “OneCare”, Microsofts “secrity solution”. Combining firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware in to one handy package…. but would you trust it?

I guess many people will, and over time we will find out if its a well spent $49.99 or not, but for me? I don’t think so. Microsoft do many things, but I think if you ask any one they will say the same thin: Microsoft don’t really do security.

Microsoft have had a firewall in XP for some time now, and the malicious software removal tool has been on windows update as well. I turn off the firewall, and the remover dosn’t really seem to do any thing. Now maybe I am being unfair, but do you dare, to use OneCare?

The last part of OneCare is the AV, now MS must know a thing or two about virus’, and who knows the OS better then them, but still, at the end of the day Microsoft has been the main victim of Virus attacks for years, why now are they trying to combat the problem?

It seems to me that basicly, no matter how good or bad OneCare actualy is, Microsoft have an uphill fight against there already poor security record. I don’t think I would trust them to keep my important data safe, or my network free from nasties. I just wont, and I suspect a lot of other people will feel the same.

In the corparte sector, where most software is paid for, other names are well estabilished and, well, who wants to say to there boss “I thought we where protected, I installed Microsoft…..” the laugthing would echo down the halls. So, for the home with many free, and perfectly good AV out there (http://www.avast.com/) why would home users pay?

All I can think of is that this is just a Microsoft way to expand a little, not to mention I bet it dosn’t install unless you have a “valid” windows key, the new way to force you to give more money to MS, like they need it?