The February edition of Virus Bulletin reviewed 15 different virus scanners for Microsoft Windows Vista platform. Included in their tests was Microsoft's own scanner along with offerings from F-Secure, Kaspersky, McAfee and Sophos.

This is the first time the VB100 comparative review has been done of Vista based anti-virus products by Virus Bulletin. The testing is simple a product has to get 100 percent detection of In the Wild test samples and no false positives in a selection of clean files using default settings.

Of the 15 products tested only 11 passed muster, the most prominent of the failures is Microsoft OneCare, it is Windows Vista integrated malware protection. Other prominent failures include the products provided by McAfee and Norman for inclusion in the tests.

The protection offered by Microsoft Defender has been called into question by some Anti-Spyware vendors after their testing showed that Defender failed to block some of the most common variations of existing spyware. In tests it appeared that various threat types including keyloggers and trojans were able to reside within the Vista test environments undetected.

With the new security features of Windows Vista being pushed as a major selling point by the Microsoft PR machine it is worrying that the protection that Microsoft OneCare and Microsoft Defender is not on a par with products from third party providers.

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