Microsoft Defender has once again scored the full 18 marks on AV-TEST"s latest ranking for the month of February 2022. Out of the full 18 marks, AV-TEST awards those products that score 17.5 points or higher as "TOP PRODUCT". The security assessment firm releases these reports every two months after evaluating the performance of various anti-malware solutions available in the market.
AV-TEST says:
During January and February 2022 we continuously evaluated 18 home user security products using their default settings. We always used the most current publicly-available version of all products for the testing. They were allowed to update themselves at any time and query their in-the-cloud services. We focused on realistic test scenarios and challenged the products against real-world threats.
In the previous two rankings of October 2021 and December 2021, Defender scored full marks as well but failed to secure any of best home antivirus awards.
In total, 18 anti-malware products including Defender were tested across three categories:
- Protection
- Performance
- Usability
You can see the scores of the various products by clicking on the image below:
Despite some of its faults, Microsoft has been continuing to add helpful features to Defender which is probably one of the reasons why it continues to do well in security assessment reports. For example, the firm recently added a "Vulnerable Driver Blocklist" option and it is also actively working to improve false positive detections.
Source: AV-TEST GmbH (Twitter)