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Microsoft is vowing to improve the performance of its home and corporate antivirus suites after the products received failing marks from a well-known testing firm.
Microsoft lost its certification from AV-Test, an independent IT security institute based in Germany. The firm's CEO, Andreas Marx, told CRN that Microsoft's corporate Forefront Endpoint protection and its Security Essentials suite underperformed in tests the institute conducted over the past four months.
"It's a bit unusual," Marx said. "Microsoft failed gaining our certification for the tests and this means from our point of view that the protection offered by the product got lower results."
[Related: Did You Hear That? Sophisticated Cyberattacks Don't Make A Lot Of Noise]
AV-Test conducts tests on more than 30 products and releases results every two months. It pits the software against a selection of known zero-day malware samples, malware samples detected over the past two to three months, and widespread malware samples.
Microsoft's corporate Forefront Endpoint protection and its Security Essentials suite for home users failed to detect 28 of the zero-day malware samples it was tested against, detecting only 78 percent of the malicious files. Both antimalware suites detected 90 percent of the "recent" samples and 100 percent of the widespread malware.
Security experts say antivirus and other signature-based security technologies have had trouble keeping up with the ever-increasing number of malware variants in the wild.
Marx said AV-Test sees three new malware samples every two seconds. In 2012, the testing firm registered 35 million new unique malware samples.
NEXT: Microsoft Vows Antivirus Performance Improvements
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