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False positives run amok in anti-malware products

by on03 August 2007


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Virus Bulletin's results

Anti-virus products are producing far too many false positive readings, accordign to a study by the independent security certification body, Virus bulletin.

The anti-malware products were all tested on 64-bit Windows Vista. Of the 20 products submitted for testing, six generated false positives when scanning a set of known clean files, thus failing to meet the requirements for VB100 certification.

Trend Micro,one of the 'big four' anti-malware companies, submitted no fewer than three of its anti-virus products, all of which falsely identified a Microsoft development tool as spyware. Other products to generate false positives were Fortinet's FortiClient, Ikarus Utilities, and VirusBuster.

John Hawes, technical consultant at Virus Bulletin said that the items added to our set of known clean files this month mostly consisted of common items taken from the 'most-popular' lists of free download sites, so it is a concern that the additions have caused such an upsurge in false detections."

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