Dangers of Microsoft OneCare

Its been a bad week for Microsoft (if only I had a nickel for every time I've said that) OneCare. OneCare is Microsoft's antivirus product and its been hit with two high profile pieces of bad news. First, in a recent roundup of antivirus software, Microsoft scored the lowest overall with a detection rate of only 82% of the tested malware. For comparison, here's a sampling of some of the other big names and their detection percentage:

• AVK.......99%
• Avira.......98%
• Kaspersky.......97%
• F-Secure.......97%
• AVG.......96%
• Symantec.......96%
• Norman.......93%
• Mcafee.......91%

A short time ago OneCare was embarrassed when the VirusBulletin group refused to certify it.

And now PC Magazine is reporting this:

If you get a virus in an email message received by Outlook, OneCare's next virus sweep may quarantine or delete your entire email store. If you receive a virus via Outlook Express OneCare may quarantine or delete the entire folder containing the virus.

Oops.

Make sure you have a good gateway antivirus solution and are only using OneCare as part of a suite of antivirus tools.

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