Database antivirus

[larouse]

Hi,

Sorry but I am not expert about these issues....But have one ask:

The quantities of DataBase of the Mfg Virus companies is Proportional at the quality of the Product ? It is, If one Antivirus has More Samples or Has More Big DataBase is better vs one with small samples and short Database ?

Thank you,

[IBK]

Hi,

No.

Regards,
IBK

[RejZoR]

Hehe IBK,the shortest complete reply i have ever seen :)

[larouse]

Why Not ?

[RejZoR]

Because number of signatures doesn't mean anything.
Antivirus developers can count each piece of malware as one signature or entire malware family as one signature. You also cannot count heuristic and generic detections/signatures. So final line is that these numbers are just a commercial trick to lure users that like higher numbers...
F-Prot and Kaspersky have nearly the same number of signatures (god knows how they count them) but Kaspersky is always far far better than F-Prot because it supports much more packers and it's using very strong generic signatures to detect entire families of worms/trojans/backdoors.
avast! for example has only 35.000 (ooficial) signatures but it's usually much better than any other AV that says it has database with 80k or 100k signatures. Generic signatures and heuristics (Mail scanner) cannot be counted again.