I’m getting really worried about Avast not keep their Number of Definitions up to speed because it make me wonder why I’m feeling unsafe at the moment, and I don’t want to get myself in the wrong idea of surrendering this great service and product by Avast.
I’m having trouble searching all the Anti-virus companies showing their total Number of Definitions so we can all compare, I can only find 3 so far and they are very current today update if you help me find them so we can compare them together that we can fully understand what really going.
Avast Total Number of Definitions total (current version 100618-1) = 2,679,916
Avast is using generic definitions along time ago and that’s why avast have a so lower number of definitions, comodo is still on the phase of restructure their definition to generic. And this took, in fact as you can see their number of definitions is decreasing. Not always the big is the best.
ps.: I only talked about comodo to gave an example.
Total number of definitions using the latest generic definitions competition by ALL anti-virus companies, a lot of people are talking and looking for competition and challenging in the best Anti-Virus latest generic definitions.
That’s how it would be, it’s no have competition is the competition that moves the software further and further. But again, creating generic definitions take allot of time and I will give the same example as before, in comodo their database is not all generic, if fact I will say not even half is generic, only than we can compare both.
Other things is that Av vendors can count definitions differently from others. And again it’s difficult to compare products.
Just like you said ;), also it depends how the av company’s to their generic defenitions for example in every update of avast fro what can I see almost all the definitions created are generic, in this case norman only do this for some files, for example (AutoRun.PGF.dropper (4 variants)).It’s pretty hard to determine if a antivirus or antimalware is the best by only looking at their definitions.
There are a marketing issue involved. Companies estimate the number of viruses by high.
There are different counts possible: variants, etc.
There is not an international rule for virus naming, so same virus could be consider one or more by other company.
Scanning settings are very important.
Active viruses (ITW) are really more important then the whole number.
Generic signatures and heuristic detections cannot be really counted as ‘virus detection’.
Well, etc. etc.
Trust avast!
Many things are detected under same names. http://www.avast.com/eng/vps_history.html only lists new names.
The number of “definitions” also counts the -gen detections somehow (Trojan-gen, …) - that are not shown on the history page.
You can say that the history page shows only new detection names, not new detections.