I have subscribed to antivirus kits since 1992 or earlier when I bought a McAfee 5.5 inch disk. At that time when I was a complete neophyte my first computer got a virus and it was almost useless afterwards. Since I started subscribing to Avast! I have had only 2 or 3 viruses show up and they seem to magically disappear. Yet today I got an automatic update of avast and some 78,000 new virus definitions were added after about 28 hours of computer shutdown. How can this even be realistic? How can Avast find and innoculate and deploy that many virus definitions? It seems absurd yet I know people whose computers have been rendered useless by viruses? How come when I check the statistics there NEVER are any infected files?
The number of definitions aren’t that much significant, higher or lower numbers.
It depends in a lot of factors…
This was discussed a lot in the past…
- 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’.
- 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.
Well, etc. etc.
Trust avast!