Friday, 29 June 2007

Security Companies Disagree On Accuracy of AV Tests

Security companies are up in arms against testing organisations according to whom the current anti-virus products are not up to mark and never help in keeping viruses at bay...

Security companies are up in arms against testing organisations according to whom the current anti-virus products are not up to mark and never help in keeping viruses at bay.

Representatives of Symantec, F-Secure, and Panda Software had agreed last month at the International Antivirus Testing Workshop in Reykjavik, Iceland, to design a new testing plan that would better reflect the capabilities of competing products. They hope all security vendors will agree on a new test that can be applied industrywide.

One of the most common tests involves running a set of malicious software samples through a product's antivirus engine. The antivirus engine contains indicators, called signatures, that enable it to identify harmful software.

But antivirus products have changed over the last couple years, and "now many products have other ways of detecting and blocking malware," said Toralv Dirron, security lead system engineer for McAfee Inc.