Have Alwil guys thought about VirusTotal? This service is similar to Jotti and it appears to be used widely. I guess it would be nice to participate on that service too (to obtain even more samples). Unlike Jotti,VirusTotal uses Windows version of antivirus.
Good way to widely test your avast! engine under Windows environment.
AntiVir and AVG are already there,but i somehow miss avast!..
It’s being worked on.
Well I have my own concerns about these multi-engine services anyway… :-\
Like tweaking malware to hide from scanners? It’s possible,but i doubt they’ll target avast!. At least not for quiet some time…
No, nothing like that.
What I meant is that some not-necessarily-trusted folks (such as the Spanish owner of virustotal.com) gather tens of thousands of malware samples - more or less for free…
Such collections can be misused.
Oh,that reason…
that’s why i think Jotti is more reliable 
…
(some maybe remember Jotti was at start providing sourcecode for his package and it got missused and he stop it (sad))
thousands pieces of malware can be good trade article when u think about …
Exactly… there has been a lot of discussion about this in the professional AV circles (namely about VirusTotal).
Hm,so VirusTotal is questionable? Should i remove link to it from my webpage?
We still have Jotti afterall…
Frankly, I don’t know…
It’s run by some guys from Malaga, Spain (this is their page: http://www.hispasec.com/ )… There’re some concerns about their trustworthiness - but I guess we can’t change anything about that, whereas avast is included in their arsenal or not…
Anyway, as I said, we’re in contact with them on implementing avast in their scanner.
Cheers
Vlk
Yeah,that was my thought too. avast! won’t make any difefrence,but since you will participate you’ll gather samples anyway. Better this than nothing.
Ok, I’m paranoid… but I don’t like this idea of the online scanners: I make all it is possible to be safe and keep my pc like a “ghost” when I’m online, so I don’t trust in unknown “free” (?) services. Nothing is free. I think so. :
Dear Mr. Kamulko,
There is on line scanners and on line scanners of course, like there are reliable software and not so reliable software. I think in the antivrus world, we do not as yet have the anti-spyware situation, where you have to establish at first hand whether you do not download rogue anti-spyware or genuine scumware, taking spyware from you machine on the one hand, and putting spyware as a LSP insert back. Do you really mean to say my friend that we should not use the free on line scanners from the bigger companies? They collect stats, all right, but anything else…? What is your feeling on that, Kamulko?
Greetings,
polonus
Hi, friend Polonus! I wrote only about the websites of multiscanners. Obviously, I trust in the single brand online scans: I used these services by McAfee, Norton, Trend Micro and Panda. But I have my doubts because they use the dangerous ActiveX Controls. The second doubt concerns the real efficiency of this method: all of us know that the most deep and credible result in scanning is obtained before the OS is running. This is the sense of the scan at reboot. Ciao!
Hi Kamulko,
I totally agree that defending the boot is very important as a defense line against viruses. Very informing is this tutorial. You can find it here: http://www.softpanorama.org/Antivirus/AV_Secrets/bootvir.shtml
It is I think very informative to our forum members as well 8).
Ciao,
polonus
Many thanks… I agree this suggestion: I think we are here to share our opinions and tl learn. I see you are very informed in many things about pc. Compliments. I’m a little paranoid, but my work of every day is in a office and I’m occupied in " case-sensitives protection and privacy" (sorry I don’t know the real translation in english to describe my job)
Hi Kamulko,
In that case you need a program like Easy Integrity Checker, so you can be sure files are checked against a cheksum. A good hex editor is a thing you may learn to use. Fine little programs are FileAlyzer by PepiMkSoftware, and a Binairy Text Scan viewer to put every file to scrutiny. Sometimes I spotted files with curious dates like 1899, which of course seems not ‘kasher’ to me,
Greets,
polonus
Polonus, unfortunately my Company is a great University-Hospital and I cannot decide
what type of software i prefer to run on the pc (the pc in my office). We work with classic Microsoft SQL databases. We have a firewall line built by our engineers of the Informatics Departement but the Antivirus is Sophos: I see how this software (Sophos) is really ridiculous ( :P).
Dear Kamulko,
So you are working in a controlled environment. The best thing to have around is a not so clever sys-admin. I always complain that my temp files are running out of mem, if they will log in so I can clean up files. They call that social engineering, don’t they? It is depending what are the rules, the best from the sys-admin point of view is just a hub, a keyboard and a screen, no floppy drives, only access to the program you need to work on, because the ignorant may copy or ??? … Then you are not supposed to put through personal mail, have to clean out your mailboxes every Monday, and what have you. Are they that strict in your work-place as well. You are logged for life now. Why Sophos? It is an encyclopedia.? In Holland sys-admins are copying trends, now they all have MacAfee and HitmanPro. When I was trained when they were rolling out Microsoft NT4 and I also have the kernel certificate, there always was a verbal fight between the Microsoft and the Unix boys. They played tricks on us letting passsword with three sss show in the event-viewer of the instructor to proof their point. Never do this at work, it is just an anecdote of mine. Keep your defenses up, and surf virus-free, “plus loin”.
Kindest regards,
polonus
Dear forum members,
Apart from a bit of joking and leg-pulling as in above-mentioned reply. What do you all reckon to be a safe environment? To what policies should one stick to keep viruses at bay. I know from the days off old, they checked mem strings as a rule of fists to suspect a virus (there weren’t that many back in 1995) (scandisk), always kept a boot-up floppy in the cupboard. Modern people copy backupserver on a dvd according to the scheme father-grandfather-greatgrandfather. Upate-antivirus-antispyware-firewall.Does the home computer user have to follow these practices? Or would it produce to many oh my grandfather’s!
What is yer folks’opinion on these matters?
greetings,
polonus