Is Windows Defender's bad detection rate a myth

This came up in a different forum and peaked my curiosity. So solcroft, is it? Or anyone else.

 

IMO, it's detection rate is below-average. It doesn't help me when cleaning infected machines (thank God for SAS, CureIt and forensic tools)

 

Have not tried it since long but when used I found it as average.
But it,s only real option for free real time AS IMO.

 

I think I'm responsible for that claim.

I won't say its excellent, and I haven't even been paying attention to it for all that long, but I've found that its poor reputation so far seems quite ill-deserved. It does a fair job of picking up the ad/spyware that, AVG Free for example, misses. I don't know to what extent Microsoft is exercising their leverages, but I have no problems imagining that their malware-collection capabilities are very fearsome indeed, should they really wish to do so.

As far as cleaning goes, I wouldn't trust any blacklist scanner for that job, not even SAS despite all the hype. That's a task that calls for SREng and GMER.

On an unrelated sidenote, ESET seems to be picking up as well. Not as crappy as it used to be these last few weeks - perhaps in preparation for the upcoming AV-C test.

 

FWIW SAS is not simply a blacklist or signature-only based scanner.

 

Well, that wouldn't surprise me. AVG free does not detect ad/spyware.

I'd say the same. Microsoft will build a big database, challenging Symantec and Kaspersky ones (IMO, the biggest)

SREng?
Agreed. But SAS does a good job on wildly infected machines so the task become alot easier.

The scanners were frozen and the sample gathering finished on February 2.