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Of the 43 products submitted for testing, seven failed to demonstrate the detection abilities required for VB100 certification, with CA and Norman among the companies whose products failed to make the grade.

While CA’s consumer and enterprise products both came across problems in detecting a small number of threats known to be circulating in the real world, the Norman product managed to achieve full detection when in on-demand mode, but missed a handful of samples of the polymorphic virus W32/Virut in its on-access mode.

Microsoft’s new free home-user product sailed through its first VB100 test without problems, as did several other newcomers to the test including Sunbelt’s Vipre and products from Qihoo and Preventon.

Overall, this month’s test has been a good one for most products
 with more than 80% of the products earning VB100 certification on this brand new platform, and the few issues that were observed with products mainly confined themselves to frustrations and irritations rather than outright show-stoppers.

VB Anti-malware Test Director John Hawes said: "There were a lot of compatibility issues for anti-malware solutions when the first betas of Windows 7 came out - we were worried that timing our first test on the platform to start just a few days after its official release would present a tough challenge to developers. However, we were impressed to see such a huge number of products working well on the new platform, with very few serious problems observed."

Hawes continued: "We saw some issues with UAC interaction in some products, which could perhaps do with some more work, but these were irritants rather than major bugs." He pointed out the lack of control options seen in several products could have its downsides: "While a lot of users prefer their anti-malware to be totally ’set-and-forget’, we try to encourage people to become more engaged with the malware problem, to understand the dangers facing them so that computer users themselves become part of the defence, rather than the weakest link in the protective chain. It can be hard to do this when some solutions provide so few opportunities for users to understand and take ownership of them."

The results of the RAP (’Reactive And Proactive’) tests conducted at the same time showed a continuation of the trends and patterns seen in recent tests, with dual-engine products Trustport and G DATA once again showing impressive scores.

VB’s cumulative RAP quadrant gives a quick visual reference as to products’ reactive and proactive detection rates - with the better performing products placed in the top right-hand corner. The RAP quadrant is available at http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/RAP/R... (Journalists are permitted to reproduce this chart as a whole.)

Virus Bulletin’s RAP testing measures products’ detection rates across four distinct sets of malware samples. The first three test sets comprise malware first seen in each of the three weeks prior to product submission. These measure how quickly product developers and labs react to the steady flood of new malware. A fourth test set consists of malware samples first seen in the week after product submission. This test set is used to gauge products’ ability to detect new and unknown samples proactively, using heuristic and generic techniques.

Virus Bulletin has been testing and certifying anti-malware products for more than ten years in the VB100 certification scheme. The stringent VB100 tests pit anti-malware products against a test set of malware from the WildList - a publicly available up-to-date list of the malware that is known to be circulating on computers around the world. To earn VB100 certification, products must be able to detect 100% of the malware contained in the WildList test set and must not generate any false alarms when scanning a set of clean files.