Microsoft Defender finally falters as it fails to woo AV-TEST in the latest rankings

Over the course of last six months or so, Microsoft"s in-house anti-malware solution Defender was enjoying a lot of praise from anti-virus assessment firm AV-TEST. That"s because Defender was scoring the full marks in the test suite carried out by AV-TEST. The program scored the full 18 marks in consecutive rankings for October 2021, December 2021 and February 2022. However, like the saying goes, all good things come to an end, and it looks like Defender"s impressive run is finally over.

According to the latest anti-virus software ranking for home users released by AV-TEST, Defender has scored a total of 17.5 points out of 18 and has still managed to received the TOP PRODUCT approval. While that doesn"t sound too bad, a lot of Microsoft"s major rivals have continued to score the full 18 points.

In this round of ranking, Defender has lost 0.5 points in the Protection category. In case you"re wondering, the three categories in AV-TEST"s ranking are:

• Protection

• Performance

• Usability

You can view the full breakdown and scores of all the 18 tested programs including Defender in the image below:

The tests were run on Windows 10. You can find the full report at this link.

Source and image: AV-TEST GmbH (Twitter)