Microsoft's Vista AV Fails Certification

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."

excuses...

[solstice680]

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...

I wonder how a Free anti-virus program would do

[mrchaotica]

Maybe the ClamAV [clamav.net] people ought to submit their program for testing.

A very good excuse...

[bhirsch]

A VB100 badge means little or nothing to these companies, much less their consumers.

Nothing to do with Vista

[ThinkFr33ly]

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 [kaspersky.com]. Another excellent vendor for Vista is AVG [grisoft.com].

Kaspersky consistantly beats [cybernetnews.com] 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!".

Mark the article tile as FUD and sensationalism.

[solitu]

Vista doesn't come with a antivirus program.
Live OneCare, Mcafee are not specific Vista -- You can install them on XP too.

And 99.99% detection rate is nothing to be sneered at.

Re:bad logic

[The Ham of Truth]

You're calling him a little girl because he has bad logic? Then... ipso facto, you're proclaiming to us a love for unicorns and Barbie dolls?

In an unrelated topic: I don't think the statement is baseless. IIRC, Gates responds to "OSX had it first" with "yeah, but we got delayed in order to secure the product first" (paraphrased, of course). Shouldn't we then expect a higher level of security then?

Re:Strange...

[sporkmonger]

I've had problems with it. Namely this problem [zdnet.com]. We ended up having almost every install of Office corrupted, as well as huge numbers of random system files as a result. My previous employer had to run System Restore on virtually every single computer on the network. The only computers that weren't down that day were the servers that were running Solaris and the Macs in the QA department. After that experience, I swore I'd never willingly install any of McAfee's products again.

Re:Remind me....

[jonadab]

I don't salivate when bells ring. I only salivate when I hear the word "Pavlov". (This is the result of an experiment we did in Intro to Psych (in the fall of 1993, IIRC) and it still works without fail every time.)

AVG

[egandalf]

AVG has earned this certification, as noted on their website, for their professional version at least. Their website doesn't specify whether the free version is VB100 also, but I would assume it does since they both should run on the same AV engine.

Did I mention they have a free version? For 9x/XP/Vista AND Linux?

Yeah.