After Cleminti released the March report that said OneCare held last place, Microsoft conceded that their antivirus software's performance was "not stellar" and promised it would make changes to boost its rankings. Today, however, when asked what the company's anti-malware team thought of its slight climb from 14th to 17th, a spokeswoman emailed a stock statement that representatives had used before.
"We are looking closely at the methodology and results of the test to ensure that Windows Live OneCare performs better in future tests and determine whether any learnings from these tests can be used to improve our services," the spokeswoman said.
Symantec's Norton AntiVirus, which detected 24 percent of the new threats, was the only product of the 17 tested that raised no false alarms. "Norton was again [for the third time] the only anti-virus product in this test which had no false positives," the report said. "This is an indication of high quality assurance tests before the release of updates in order to avoid false positives."
The praise was poorly timed, as Symantec released a signature a week ago that mistook critical Windows files for a Trojan, and after falsely quarantining the files, crippled thousands, perhaps millions, of PCs in China.
Cleminti's report is available on the AV-Comparatives website
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