Re: Clamav

From: "Tim" <ignored_mailbox@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, 2010/April/20 06:00


Tim:
If you read the reviews of anti-virus software, from time to time, you
will see that none of them are 100% effective. The last review I read
came to the conclusion that the most effective checkers only managed to
find about 60% of the viruses, and not all the same viruses. That is a
pretty poor rating - just a bit less than half will get through.

jdow:
The last time I ran though a complete rating of AV tools none of them
were
as bad as you declare. Please enhance your assertions with facts not
fantasy. It makes your assertions stronger.

It's been a while since I last bothered to check up on software that I
don't run, however "60%" was the effectiveness rating at that time, and
it did draw (internet) headlines. Are you seriously telling me that you
hadn't encountered that? I'm talking about news stories that circulated
somewhere around a year ago, if I recall correctly. It was notably
surprising because of that low effectiveness rate, even running multiple
anti-virus software still left a lot undetected. At the time, it was
used to sink the boot into the silly notion that anti-virus software was
enough to protect you from bad software.

From time to time, the figure will change, but there can't be any sane
argument that they're 100% effective, as it's simply not possible.

I didn't bookmark the info, since I've no desire to go bookmarking every
tidbit that I come across, but it's not hard to Google search this sort
of thing, and come across quite a lot of less-than-encouraging info:

http://www.anti-malware-test.com/?q=taxonomy/term/17
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antivirus_software#Effectiveness
http://blogs.cisco.com/security/comments/the_effectiveness_of_antivirus_on_new_malware_samples/
http://www.zdnet.com.au/why-popular-antivirus-apps-do-not-work-139264249.htm

Bum reading of the data. All that shows is that some products that call
themselves "Anti-Virus" are dreadful. Some are very good. Here is a set of
comparisons with a selection of products and a detailed methodology. You
can find the tests you want by digging. For a test of responsiveness to
malwares on 100 brand new samples detection was between 60% and 99%
depending on the product tested.

http://www.av-comparatives.org/

It's time to stop this. We're wandering off the Linux malware discussion,
which I suspect is finished.

{^_^}

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