[dba-Tech] Trend, Sophos and McAfee flunk Vista SP1 anti-virus tests

Jon Tydda jon.tydda at alcontrol.com
Fri Apr 4 03:39:17 CDT 2008


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/03/vista_sp1_av_tests/
 
Top tier anti-virus vendors including McAfee, Trend Micro, and Sophos
all failed to secure Windows Vista SP1 in recent independent tests.
 
Virus Bulletin, the independent security certification body, said 17 of
37 anti-virus products tested failed to reach the VB100 certification
standard. McAfee VirusScan, Trend Micro Internet Security and Sophos
Anti-Virus overlooked threats known to be in circulation. Other vendors
whose products failed to make the grade included Alwil, BitDefender,
Norman, PC Tools, and VirusBuster.
 
Some of the ignored threats - largely polymorphic file infectors - have
been in circulation for months. "It is disappointing to see so many
products tripping up over threats that are not even new - computer users
should be getting a better service from their anti-virus vendors than
this," Virus Bulletin technical consultant John Hawes said.
 
Products from Symantec, Microsoft (which has problems in the past in
previous VB100 tests), AVG, and Kaspersky Lab all passed.
 
Although still lagging behind Windows XP, Vista is likely to see more
widespread use with the introduction of its first service pack, making
it more important for anti-virus vendors to deliver dependable
protection for the platform. Vista SP1 came out in mid March.
 
Virus Bulletin's VB100 tests pit each anti-virus product against a set
of viruses from the WildList, a publicly available up-to-date list of
viruses known to be circulating. To earn VB100 certification, products
must be able to detect all the viruses contained in the WildList test
set without generating false alarms when scanning a set of clean files.
 
Unlike other certification schemes, Virus Bulletin tests all products
free of charge and does not allow re-testing. Virus Bulletin's
comparative reviews also cover detection rates against a selection of
zoo viruses (those not seen outside the laboratory), scanning speeds,
and computational overheads.
 
 
Jon



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