Anti-Virus/Trojan software

Since no one has mentioned anti-trojan software, is it a correct assumption that all of the major AV software vendors include anti-trojan components in their software?

Are there other types of malicious code, which AV / AT software scans for?

What types of malicious code is not being caught by which AV / AT software?

Thanks,

Linda

 

Hi Linda,

Yes, they do include anti-trojan components. But they aren't that good at it overall. There are certainly some very good AV/AT-scanners out there (for example KAV), but not all are very good in trojan detection. Imagine, AV programmers mostly deal with viruses, worms,... and invest their time there. On the other side AT programmers deal only with trojans and invest their time fully in that area (look at DiamondCS for example). Now make the conclusion for yourself, what is more efficient: Someone how deals with viruses, worms and trojans or someone who just deals with viruses, worms and another just with trojans?

I'm sure that others don't have the same opinion as I have, but if we take the money and the costs into account, it's almost impossible nowadays to pay a staff which deals with viruses, worms and trojans. This is the economical view of this -if we take the psycological view you can call this Taylorism (and/or even Fordism). Advantages of that should be known to everyone, because our daily life is mostly built up on these theories.

Best regards,

Patrice

 

Hi Lin,

Some do..some do not they all make a stab at it.

Yes some AV products also tackle a broad scope of exploits classified as malware..but nowdays some of that is closer to a trojan or a worm.

The answer to your last question would take a whole new thread

So I will just cut it short here since this is a poll.

Regard,

John

 

"NOD32 Receives Record-Shattering 22nd VB100% Award from Virus Bulletin Magazine maintaining its #1 position in "Antivirus Industry Bible" testing for both accuracy AND scanning speed. NOD32, is the only product in the world to never miss an "In the Wild" (ItW) virus in more than 5 years of Virus Bulletin testing. NOD32's remarkable five-year run of 100% detection of every ItW virus is due to its unique core technology which addresses both known and unknown viruses. In addition to unbeatable 100% detection, NOD32 also demonstrated an awesome throughput rate in excess of five million kilobytes per second."

As if that were not enough read about "The Future is Now" HERE.

As far as Anti-Troijan programs - "Leading anti-virus systems are good at detecting viruses, but relatively poor at trojan detection. TDS detects several thousand trojans that we can confirm are still not detected by any anti-virus programs. One reason for this is that anti-virus researchers have a lot more to deal (such as over 50,000 viruses!) so they must limit how much time they spend on anti-trojan research. This is not the case with TDS, where we work fulltime doing nothing but trojan research and development."
The future of TDS - "We're now working on TDS-4 for a release in 2003. We have big plans for TDS and we'd like to extend an invitation to you for you to enjoy them!"

Above borrowed from the ESET and DiamondCS web sites.

 

Thanks QSection! Very interesting information.