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Many Antivirus Tools Fail in LinuxWorld Test
talkinsecurity writes "In a public, side-by-side test conducted last night at LinuxWorld, ten antivirus products were confronted with 25 known viruses. The results were surprisingly disparate. Only three of the products caught all of the viruses; three only caught 61 percent, and one caught an abysmal 6 percent. The test, which wasn't particularly complicated, proves that there still are wide differences in the effectiveness of AV tools. A lot of people think all AV tools are the same — they're not!"
From TFA:
Kaspersky, Symantec, and Clam AV: 100% caught
FProt and Sophos: 94%
McAfee: 89%
GlobalHauri, Fortinet, and SonicWall: 61%
WatchGuard's Linux AV: 6%
And a graph of the results plus links to some of the test viruses: http://virus.untangle.com/
What about AVG? I really love it. I've installed on both my workstations and a server (Windows). It uses minimal resources, it's fast, and it's managed to catch more stuff then Trend Micro, Symantec and McAfee.
Also, Bitdefender and Nod32 are also good for the Windows enviroment. I'm curious to how all these ranked in the Linux world.
Life is not for the lazy.
Linux mail directors/servers/etc. often run AV to scan mail for their more vulnerable cousins from Redmond.
You are still innocent until proven guilty. What's changed is what they do to innocent people. - notnAP, #26891325
...considering that most of the antivirus programs were tricked when a new "variant" of one of the worms back around '99 or so. So kids- just insert random whitespace into your worms!
The change? The line endings in the VBS script changed. It probably wasn't even intentional- some broken mail server probably modified CR's into CRLF's. It sailed right past Trend Micro's email scanner and infected several dozen systems.
I was the first person to notice why it slipped by, and brought it to the attention of a big-name "security expert" who ran a mailing list which shall go unnamed. He thanked us for the research, passed along my findings to the list, and then promptly went around doing interviews with the press using the first person voice. "I discovered that...", blah blah was what I read the next day.
Please help metamoderate.
Not to knock Clam but there is something odd about these results (Besides the absurdly low testbed). TFA says Clam won two years ago (which meant Untangle would use it), and again now. However, just last May the results from AV-Test.org (a real trusted legitimate source) against a comprehensive testbed put ClamAV near the bottom of the heap: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2135053,00.as p
I can't help but think that Untangle is trying to justify their own choice, rather than have a real test. With a testbed of only 25-35, it is possible to pick a group of malware that can put any AV on top. Even the user submitted malware is suspect, especially when that testset is also so low. ClamAV is great against virus outbreaks, with one of the fastest signature responses, but it has pretty atrocious trojan and zoo detection, since there is not enough man-power to collect and create signatures for less prevalent and non-replicating malware.
And this is especially good news for those of us utilizing CLAM. You COULD spend a heap of cash adding on tons of crap to an exchange server and hope that it doesn't implode under the weight... or you could have a postfix mail gateway with Clam AV and some simple spam blocking techniques for only the cost of time and hardware. It's also good in a way that not only do you not get viruses IN, but you can keep them from going out as well. You've obviously got issues at that point, but at least you're not spreading the plague. All thanks to open source goodness.
Well examining the Excel sheet here http://virus.untangle.com/, they used 18 test cases, so they got 5.6% for Watchguard
The summary was wrong, it's either 18 test case or 35 test case, depending of the section you're looking at...
I didn't found something funny to put here.
Another viable option are the managed services i.e. messagelabs and postini. they are becoming increasingly popular and are alot simpler to implement for small business.
Because the summary isn't right.
They used 18 test cases, Watchguard got only one : 1/18 = 5.55%, rounded = 6%
All from the spreadsheet available at http://virus.untangle.com/
I didn't found something funny to put here.
Have you ever worked in a tech department that had to support frozen computers? It turns a project that would maybe take fifteen or twenty minutes per lab into something more like and hour long. The school district that I work for used Deep Freeze on most of the desktops at the high school up until about a year or two ago. Taking DF off made it a lot quicker to make minor changes to the computers during the year, and there hasn't been any significant problems. Students and teachers are also happier with it because it prevents stuff that people have saved in My Documents (yes, the kids are told over, and over again to save to their mapped home directories - but occasionally they don't) from being wiped out.
About the same time as that we also took students out of the Admin group (I'm not exactly sure why they were in there in the first place - no apps have had any problems with it), so that mitigated any significant problems as well. We also have McAfee managed AV and 8e6 web filtering, but AFAIK its fairly rare that any viruses or malware are found on the student computers. The laptops that the teachers have(and have admin rights on) are another story. But they would whine if they couldn't add weatherbug and have five different toolbars in IE. Deep Freeze is really just a crappy way of avoiding the problem instead of dealing with it and fixing it. Students/regular non-admin users should not be able to cause damage to the OS. In a well run environment there shouldn't be tons of problems with malware. Yeah, there is going to be an occasional piece of malware that exploits a security vulnerability that could screw up the system. But it is not that hard to lock down boxes properly, with group policy and using the default Windows groups.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
000_eicar.com
001_eicarcom2.zip
002_eicar_com.zip
003_eicar.rar
004_eicar.zip.bad_extension
005_eicar_big.zip
010_18_04_2005.exe
011_abuselist.zip
012_fullstory.exe
013_image.jpg.exe
014_message.pif
015_mntrup.exe
016_patch-6143.zip
017_photo.pif
018_q347558.exe
019_scan_check.jpg.exe
020_test.zip
021_The_taxation.zip
100_8.zip
101_scan.jpg
102_Syndony.zip
103_Update-KB8136
104_Attachement.scr
105_image.jpg.exe
106_Info.exe
107_Please-confirm-pay
108_virus_87
109_virus_88
110_vvzh.scr
111_xxx.com
112_untangle1.zip
113_untangle21.zip
114_untangle22.zip
115_untangle3.zip
116_untangle4.zip
One product, WatchGuard's Linux AV tool, caught fewer than 6 percent of the viruses sent to it. "We're not exactly sure what the problem with WatchGuard is," says Morris. "The test was set up the same way for all of the vendors."
:). My question would be which is it? Either way, my system would be compromised by either 24 or 25 viruses -- neither of which is a good scenario especially in regards to well-known viruses (according to the article no 0-day exploits were accepted).
This number quoted by the original poster missed the section in bold, it was technically < 6%, which could mean either 0 or 1 virus (funny how everything always works out to binary in some way or another