ClamWin antivirus, new and free antivirus!!!

AntiVir - which, out of all AVs, has the worst score on the Virus Bulletin website - supposedly has a database of over 80,000 viruses.

F-Prot for DOS - perhaps the best free AV out there - supposedly scans for between 70,000 and 80,000 viruses.

I'm pretty sure I've heard of commercial AVs that (supposedly) scan for even more. (Panda, IIRC, supposedly scans for over 100,000.)

20,000 different nasties is a lot, but is it enough?

 

As I remarked, my clamav caught nearly every virus on my mailaccounts. What was not caught by clam, was secured by Outpost firewall, renaming unsafe extensions of worm attachments. I would say that the reliability of clamav is over 99%. That's more than enough for me. What's the use of tens of thousands of sigs for zoo virusses when a wild virus signature is not included?
Besides, clamav has lots of unpacking engines, so it can run very effectively.

I'm a firm believer in open source solutions, wether it is software, legal business (groklaw.net), security (wilders ) or services (anti virus databases).

 

Any new AV has to contend with the fact that they aren't going to have masses of old viruses which were around, some 10 or more years ago. Viruses that noone ever spreads anymore. Remember - usually there is only a small number of viruses ITW, a new AV could come along and get 100% ITW detection quickly.

There WILL however be misses. I feel 99% is way too high. 99% ITW worms and 90% ITW file infectors yes, 99% trojans, no way.

 

The number of signatures doesn´t say too much about the quality of a scanner imho. Take Dr. Web for example - if AntiVir comes with 80.000 signatures and Dr.Web is able to achieve better results - with 50.000 signatures - what does it tell us? If you take a look at AV-Comparatives you can see how excellent Dr.Web performs, even with one of the smallest signature collections out there.

upps...where am i..oh, off-topic.