Hi!
did anybody know, how many viruses are there in program virus database for now?
Tnx
Hi, welcome to the forums.
This has been covered a number of times in these forums.
This is a little irrelevant, there is no comparative value comparing numbers/totals because different AV companies use different naming conventions as well as how they count them also.
If you wanted to know you could do a search and use the * wildcard to give a total of all, but as I said it has little worth.
Small tidbit ;)) http://www.avast.com/eng/vps_history.html
try count and You get little part of mosaic
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’.
Well, etc. etc.
Trust avast!
McAfee released a paper where they wrote about virus naming and number of virus records; I think it explains good the thing. The paper is about Spyware counting, but it does mention also other things.
http://download.nai.com/products/mcafee-avert/WhitePapers/Shades0fGray_Anti-Spyware_Technical_Whitepaper0205v1.pdf