News
12 anti-virus products fail VB100 certification
August 2009 by Marc Jacob
Independent testing body reveals latest VB100 certification
results alongside the new ’RAP quadrant’ showing Reactive And
Proactive detection abilities of anti-virus products.
Virus Bulletin, the independent security testing body, has
revealed which products are up to the task of protecting Windows
Vista in its latest VB100 certification.
Of the 35 products tested 12 failed to reach the VB100
certification, failing on false positives and a tricky
polymorphic file infector.
The RAP (’Reactive And Proactive’) test conducted at the same
time revealed some disappointingly low detection rates for
several products.
Test director John Hawes said: "We saw some particularly poor
detection of emerging threats and the products in question have
a lot of work to do if they are to provide acceptable protection
for their customers."
"After the fourth round of RAP testing, several products are
consistently turning out great RAP scores and marking out their
territory in the top right-hand corner of the RAP quadrant. All
products should be aiming for this position and we hope to see
an improvement in RAP scores in the future."
Virus Bulletin’s RAP testing measures products’ detection rates
across four distinct sets of malware samples. The first three
test sets comprise malware first seen in each of the three weeks
prior to product submission. These measure how quickly product
developers and labs react to the steady flood of new malware. A
fourth test set consists of malware samples first seen in the
week after product submission. This test set is used to gauge
products’ ability to detect new and unknown samples proactively,
using heuristic and generic techniques.
Virus Bulletin has been testing and certifying anti-malware
products for more than ten years in the VB100 certification
scheme. The stringent VB100 tests pit anti-malware products
against a test set of malware from the WildList - a publicly
available up-to-date list of the malware that is known to be
circulating on computers around the world. To earn VB100
certification, products must be able to detect 100% of the
malware contained in the WildList test set and must not generate
any false alarms when scanning a set of clean files.
A chart summarizing the RAP results obtained between February
and August 09 is available at
http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/RAP/RAP-quadrant-Feb-Aug09.jpg
Journalists are permitted to reproduce this chart as a whole.
The results of the August 2009 VB100 review can be seen at
http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archive/2009/08 [registration
required - free of charge]
The full review, including detailed results tables, is available
to Virus Bulletin subscribers at
http://www.virusbtn.com/virusbulletin/archive/2009/08/vb200908-comparative
or in PDF format at
http://www.virusbtn.com/pdf/magazine/2009/200908.pdf
A PDF copy of the comparative review is available to journalists
at http://www.virusbtn.com/files/VB100-August09.pdf (Please do
not reproduce this link.)
A full description of the RAP testing methodology can be seen at
http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/vb200902-RAP-tests [registration
required - free of charge]
