A few days ago we covered AV-Comparatives’ latest report on internet threat protection. The company found that some popular products from vendors like Microsoft Defender, and Kaspersky, among a few others, have regressed in terms of performance compared to last time.

Like AV-Comparatives, AV-TEST, which is another malware assessment company, recently released its latest findings. The new report, as usual, evaluates various anti-malware solutions in terms of protection, performance and usability.

Overall, despite being among the fairly popular antivirus products, Malwarebytes scored the lowest in the protection category, compared to other popular anti-malware solutions such as Avast/AVG, Microsoft Defender and Kaspersky, among others, as it scored 5.5 out of 6 points .

You can see the scores obtained in percentages and out of 6 points in each of the three categories, as well as the certificates awarded to each product, in the two images below (click on them to enlarge):

The reason for the lower score appears to be its failure to perform as well as the others against 0-day samples. AV-TEST notes that Malwarebytes scored below the industry average of 99.6% with a detection rate of 98.5% and 99.6% in May and June 2023 tests, respectively.

Speaking of Malwarebytes, another area where it seems to suffer is in system resource utilization in at least one of the scenarios tested. In the performance section of the test, which measures the “average effect of the product on the speed of the computer in everyday use,” the software scored 17% in the “slower launch of standard software applications” subcategory in May 2023. To Malwarebytes’ credit, however, June’s result Better because it almost halved at just 9%, which is right around the industry average of 10%.

Others like Defender, Kaspersky and Norton, among others. We also exhibited some of these symptoms in specific circumstances. Kaspersky, for example, was really slow when “launching popular sites”, as it stood at 20% in both May and June compared to the industry average of 14%.

Microsoft Defender, interestingly, was really bad at “installing frequently used applications” while, at the same time, it was exceptional in the “launching standard software applications” category. As you can see in the image below, Microsoft’s product was at 17% in May 2023 and worsened to 21% in June, compared to an industry average of 14%. Norton demonstrated similar behavior with 24% and 20% in May and June respectively.

In case you’re wondering about the winners, the best performers were Avast/AVG, McAfee and Bitdefender. You can find the full test results and details about it Page On AV-TEST’s website.