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Microsoft's Vista AV Fails Certification

Posted by kdawson on from the black-eye dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's much-hyped anti-virus solution, Live OneCare and three other Vista AV products failed to achieve the Virus Bulletin's VB100 certification. The other products are McAfee's VirusScan Enterprise, G DATA's AntiVirusKit 2007, and Norman's VirusControl. All failed to pass a series of tests that are required to display the VB100 badge. 'With the number of delays that we've seen in Vista's release, there's no excuse for security vendors not to have got their products right by now,' said John Hawes, technical consultant at Virus Bulletin."

8 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. excuses... by solstice680 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What about "We didn't have access to Vista's internals until two months ago?"

    That would be a good excuse for most security vendors...

    1. Re:excuses... by ThinkFr33ly · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually, the details on implementing anti-virus for Vista, and other low level filters, have been available for well over a year. Some documentation has been avilable for more than 2 years.

      That's how companies like Kaspersky and AVG came out with fully Vista compliant versions of their software months ago. Software which works extremely well, by the way. (Kaspersky passed this test. It says so right in the article.)

  2. Nothing to do with Vista by ThinkFr33ly · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This has nothing to do with Vista, and everything to do with crappy anti-virus products. Neither OneCare or McAfee for XP have ever tested well, so why would anybody think that they would test well on Vista?

    If you read the entire article, you'll notice a little blurb at the end that several vendors passed the test, one of which was Kaspersky. Another excellent vendor for Vista is AVG.

    Kaspersky consistantly beats all the other major anti-virus vendors, but I guess the story wouldn't be quite as Slashdot-worthy if it ready "Kaspersky Anti-Virus on Vista Works Great!".

    1. Re:Nothing to do with Vista by zx-15 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Kaskpersky is certainly a very effective antivirus, a lot of security comes from using 100% of CPU when browsing network folders, thus preventing the user from downloading viruses.

  3. OH NO, NO VB100??!? by madsheep · · Score: 5, Funny

    I heard they also didn't earn the WTF200 or the LOL500. Based on failing to get the three of these certifcations and seeing how all three of them are as equally popular..this software will surely be going no where.

  4. Re:Remind me.... by wordsnyc · · Score: 5, Funny

    They rang the fucking bell days ago. Salivate, dammit.

    --
    Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
  5. Re:*What* VirusControl? by DeeZee · · Score: 5, Informative

    Norman was founded in 1984, well before Peter Norton made an antivirus utility.

    Thanks for playing, though!

  6. Re:Hello Symantec... by BCoates · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... Symantec and McAffee to get their shit together and make an antivirus that doesn't suck.

    I'm not sure such a thing is even possible anymore. The usefulness of AV software has always been pretty questionable, and they never seem to have gotten over the threat model of months or years-old viruses being passed from floppy to floppy. Most threats are one-off now, like social engineering spam, one-day long trojan horse attacks, adware, and exploiting OS vulnerabilities to run spam zombies. As far as I can tell, my resource-hogging, system-destabilizing virus scanner does effectively nothing against any of those and there's no reason to believe it can be changed to do so.