Accidents will happen, but until the average users are willing to take/accept responsibility for their actions/activities online, malware will always be a threat. Instead folk on the Web want to rely upon third party software to protect them from their own folllies. Kinda like a drunk driver not understanding why he got a DWI - he was just havin' fun.
When I was on CompuServe many moons ago, there was a guy - Ross Greentree or Greenberg, I think - who challenged virus writers to attack him. (This was when Peter Norton (nice guy) and Ron McAfee (ego and bad attitude) and Phil Katz (ZIP format author - interesting story tied to that) were just getting started.) He considered his protections to be superior. It wasn't. A lot of folk browsing today have Ross' attitude: they can go anywhere because they are protected, so they don't have to exercise caution, just have fun - just like that guy with the DWI.
The willingly unaware will always be in danger, for, as Renegade said, "New threats will always emerge."-barney
It's definitely too often overlooked that the person is an integral part of their security. It's just like any RL security: you need to lock your doors, don't park in a bad part of town if you don't have to, don't leave an expensive laptop alone in public spaces, and so on. Part of the problem is that there isn't much education on the matter, though. I've been recently thinking that AV software really should have a "product tour" when installed (like so many other apps) that shows the user what real alerts look like (as opposed to the fake AV popups and such), generally how it works, and things to look out for while using the computer.
With that said, this test was deeply flawed. They used VirusTotal, which does NOT give an accurate picture of how well the software protects the user (VirusTotal themselves state this -- they use the commandline scanner only, which often doesn't include things like heuristics, for starters; see
HERE).
AV testing is also something that really requires that the tester be highly knowledgeable on the subject to get meaningful results. Even if they had done things right, though, they didn't use enough samples to be statistically significant. Lastly, it's true that simple file detection is not enough to keep a system protected, but there's more to antivirus software than simple file scanning.
There's a response article
HERE.
