Microsoft Security Essentials has once again proven itself to be inadequate for protecting a computer. The tests this time were conducted by security firm Dennis Technology Labs, which evaluated eight major antivirus programs from October to December 2012. Microsoft's Security Essentials application was found to be significantly worse than all seven other products in the tests.
The tests measured how well a product protects against malware, as well as how well it handles legitimate applications. Dennis Technology Labs scored a security application on how well it could stop threats and how well it allowed legitimate programs to install and run, deducting points when it failed to stop a threat or when it didn't handle legitimate files properly.
Overall, the best score was 400 points and the worst was -1000: Microsoft Security Essentials managed to score only 30 points, while other products, such as Norton Internet Security 2013, “caught” 388.5, almost reaching the maximum result. The awards given to the programs that received a decent score ranged from AAA to C, however, Microsoft Security Essentials’ behavior was so bad that it could not get any of them. All other products won one award, and five of them won at least an A, as reported by Neowin.
The protection ratings ranked a product based on how well it handled malware attacks. The best possible score here was 300 points and the worst was -500. Microsoft Security Essentials scored -70 and was the only program to score negatively, while most other programs scored between 250 and 300.
When you look at the data more closely, it turns out that MSE only protected against 59% of the sample of threats. The average was 92% for the other programs, and Trend Micro Internet Security 2013 managed the perfect score, getting a 100%. The good news is that Microsoft Security Essentials did not show any false positives during testing, and was the only product other than Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 to do so.
