Almost a year ago when Microsoft was busy developing it's free to use anti-virus - "Morro" there was a lot of speculation about it in the tech industry. Someone from Norton even said that Microsoft is two to four years behind Symantec in the Anti-virus products. Now after one year, tests have proved that Microsoft is finally catching up with the Anti-virus industry leader - Symantec.

An independent testing firm NSS Labs tested major Anti-Virus solution providers for some pre-defined parameters and found that Microsoft’s Security Essentials outperformed majority of the paid Anti-Virus software including Symantec’s Norton Internet Security 2010 for some parameters and performed equally for other parameters.

Here is a summary of the results of the test conducted by NSS Labs:

• Symantec’s software detected 72.3% of malware installed on the test systems of NSS Labs while Microsoft’s Security Essentials found 75%

• In the exploit prevention test, Symantec stopped 64% of exploits, while Microsoft stopped 60%.

• Overall, NSS Labs rated both Norton Antivirus and Microsoft Security Essentials as "neutral".

You can go through the entire results of the test in this document.