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Microsoft Fails Antivirus Certification Test (Again), Challenges the Results
redletterdave writes "For the second time in a row, Microsoft's Security Essentials failed to earn certification from AV-Test, the independent German testing lab best known for evaluating the effectiveness of antivirus software. Out of 25 different security programs tested by AV-Test, including software from McAfee, Norman, Kaspersky, and others, Microsoft's Security Essentials was just one out of three that failed to gain certification. These results are noteworthy because Microsoft Security Essentials is currently (as of December) the most popular security suite in North America and the world."
I'm anything but a Microsoft lover, but I have to defend them.
About a million years ago, back during the DOS era, a friend and I wrote an anti-virus suite (the ARF Antivirus, maybe you can still find it online, though I don't recommend that you use it!). It was quite effective; we used the file integrity approach, and stored the integrity information in the files themselves. (We were up front about it; some people don't like that, so we said, hey, you don't like it, just don't use our stuff. No hard feelings.)
Ergo, I think I can at least offer an opinion that's slightly above drooling moron status.
One of my biggest complaints about AV tests is that they're unrealistic. This has been years ago, now, so maybe it has changed, but back then, the folks who did the testing were arrogant and very hard to deal with. Your software had to produce a .TXT log file; it had to do this, it had to do that, or they would just fail it outright.
Once you made them happy, then they tested it against every virus they could find, including some that WERE NOT (and never would be) in the wild.
Bottom line, and to make a long story short: the people who were writing AV software back then were writing it for these tests, and not for the real world. I don't know if that's the case nowadays; I just don't know. (For that matter, maybe Microsoft's stuff really does suck. Given how badly their stuff worked back in the DOS era, it wouldn't surprise me. But I just don't know.)
But fair is fair. I ran from that circus after about a year of endless arguments with the pompous egotists in Compuserve's Anti Virus forum. I don't know if it's still that way, but I haven't used anyone else's anti virus stuff in years (I protect my stuff a different way, primarily by using secured Linux with good backups, and with periodic integrity checks).
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
So long as you keep your software updated then there's not really much of a point other than the chance you'll spread an infected file onward without being infected yourself.
Think. No, that's not good enough, think some more: Viruses (we are explicitly talking viruses here, says "Antivirus" right in the test and headline) exploit unpatched vulnerabilities (mistakes) in software. Patched software is immune to the prior vulnerabilities, so AV won't "protect" you from things you're immune to. It also won't protect you from viruses with signatures that it doesn't know about. So, What's the point of wasting all those CPU cycles scanning? Oh, maybe you got infected and it could remove it later? WRONG. Viruses actually mutate, say a malware author snags a virus, they reverse engineer how the payload is delivered and they change the payload to theirs and send it on its way -- The malware can even install other malware once it gets running. So, the (automated) removal options/instructions are probably not complete if the code has ever had a chance to run before. Ah, so now you may be thinking that it's exactly the reason why you'd waste CPU time on an AV scan, to detect infection so at least you'll know -- Except that's just silly. Think. If you were a spy and I asked you if you were a spy then would you say yes? An AV running in an infected machine can not reliably determine the state of the infected machine. AV: "Any Viruses here" Virus: "Nope!"
Often times I'll get people telling me, no matter which AV product they're using, that their machine is working strange, slower, showing adverts and wrong websites, and their AV will be chugging along saying everything is fine. You get more reliable warning from the malware itself! "You may have been Infected with 2042 viruses!" the scareware will prompt every boot, while Norton, or McAfee, or AVG, or ANY AV product I run across the infected machine says the coast is clear. You can't "remove" malware -- Nuke it from orbit, and re-install, it's the only way to be sure.
Look, people, hardware supports virtualization now. If you're NOT running your Windows boxen in a VM, then you're not concerned enough about security to benefit from an anti-virus anyway. Boot from a known clean state, maybe even a LiveCD/USB then do your virus scanning from there if you want to be able to detect anything with any degree of certainty, and even then it's questionable. If your data partition is separate from your (virtual) OS partitions then you can just always run (or restore) from a known good snapshot, and install updates to the known good snapshots, then make another snapshot before you do anything else.
I'm no Microsoft apologist, I don't have to worry about such things as much anymore because I use an OS that gets the patches out much faster than MS does, but I can certainly see where the people who understand the issues in Microsoft might realize that Antivirus isn't really the right option anyway, it's just a waste of time and there are other better solutions... Windows Steady State (or whatever it's called now), for example.
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
"The significant problems we face can not be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."
- Albert Einstein