Bad notes to avast... and the other antivirus...

General Topics
1

Comparison between major scanners on detection of new threats identified by the Malware Incident Reporting & Termination (MIRT) team.

The results are the very good new threat detection rate of AntiVir and the relatively poor performance of AVG and Avast! with Kaspersky and NOD32 falling in the middle.

Almost all have poor performance in detecting new threats that maybe is saying that you no longer can rely exclusively on signature based anti malware products to protect you from the current onslaught of new threats.

More info:
http://techsupportalert.com/issues/issue144.htm#Section_0
and
http://winnow.oitc.com/malewarestats.php

2

More stats on new threat detection here:

http://www.shadowserver.org/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Stats.VirusDailyCharts

3

avast! has improved a lot in detection at ShadowServer- the avast! pie used to be mostly red, now it’s mostly green!

4

My own take is, these kind of stats from OTC reward scanners which are most speculative, and more FP prone. Antivir is particularly FP prone and uses packer based detections a lot.

I would add that since Tech posted this, the results from OTC seems to have changed with Kaspersky gaining significantly, though the rest look roughly the same as before iirc.

http://winnow.oitc.com/AntiVirusPerformance.html

I can’t remember much about shadowserver though i remember listing it.