Anti-Virus Effectiveness Down from Last Year

juct sends us Heise Security's summary of an article detailing the abilities of 17 current anti-virus solutions. German computer magazine c't has found that, compared to last year, the virus scanners are having a more difficult time recognizing malware. Quoting Heise: "For real protection, however, in view of the flood of new malware, the way these programs cope with new and completely unfamiliar attacks is more important. And that's where almost all of the products performed significantly worse than just a year ago. The typical recognition rates of their heuristics fell from approximately 40-50 per cent in the last test - at the beginning of 2007 - to a pitiful 20-30 per cent."

Comments

Re:yeah, but..

[_merlin]

Considering how few viruses run on Linux, it's not as big a deal for Linux users. However, Linux machines that deliver content to Windows users (mail servers, usenet servers, bulletin boards, etc.) are a useful application for Linux virus scanners that detect viruses for other platforms. And the big names do function in this role: Kaspersky and AVG both have products for doing just this. And there's the free ClamAV as well, of course. The Linux versions of the big name products are probably no more or less effective than the Windows versions.