It’s tough at the top for anti-virus products

Results of independent tests by AV-Comparatives looking at the real world protection offered by leading packages show that competition is as fierce as ever.

The tests use 569 real-world malicious URLs. 138 of these are blocked by a Windows 7 system with all its patches up to date, leaving 431 to be intercepted by security software. The tests use MS Security Essentials as a baseline providing a 95.4 percent level of protection. You can see the full results on an interactive chart but it’ll come as no surprise that it’s all pretty close.