                        The number of detected virii war
                        --------------------------------

If you dig a bit on AV world, you will discover AVers are not a happy
family. They have their own fights, even in some cases they hate more other
AVers than VXers.

Well known is the love between a lot of AVers and Zvi Netiv. Less known
are the fights for the conquer of the AV market between companies.

And when they meet together in acts like CEBIT in Germany or COMDEX in
USA, they also try to fuck each others. They put their publicity in the
stand of the competence as example.

From some months ago there is a new fight in the AV world: The number
of detected virii war!

The war starts when F-Prot company releasd 3.0 version and they claimed their
product was able to detect over 19,000 virii.

Before, almost all AV products used to detect between 9,000 and 12,000 virii.
So, the step F-Prot did shaked the AV panorama.

What was the reaction of other AV products? Start to lie as F-Prot people did
instead kick some AV asses.

So, Dr. Solomon jumped to 21,000 virii detected. And finally AVP launched
his product like a rocket to reach over 30,000 virii detected.

A precedent in war was the "my product detects the 100% of virii".

People as Eugene Kaspersky had enough courage to say it was a big fool. As
he said: "claim that is a hit to the intelligence of the customer".

Well, at this moment Eugene doesn't have the same courage he used to have.
He should say his product doesn't detect over 30,000 virii and if anyone
claims that, it's a hit to the intelligence of the user too.

Eugene already thinks it, said Rod Fewster, AVP distributor for Australia and
friend of Eugene, but that's a war and he doesn't want to loose any battle.

But taking apart this question, they even lie and fool their dear customers
even more. AV companies are very trickers... ;)

F-Prot or AVP, only as example, are able to detect the same virus under 2 or
3 signatures.

How do they do it? Only changing the compilation commands or using different
compilers: TASM or A86 as example.

If that's not a trick to detect more virii and increase the number of
detected virii... what's it?

It means that from a collection of 7,000 source codes, you could create an
antivirus with 12,000 - 14,000 signatures. Then you run PS-MPC, VCL, IVP
and similar virus constructions kits and you reach 20,000 signatures. You only
need to inflate the numbers a bit and... TAAAAACHAN!!!!!!!

You have a top eleet antivirus!

Pathetic but that's what it's happening.

If you want to know the real number of detected virii of AVP or F-Prot, you
can use an util coded by Jack Liu, named AVLIST. It's a program that
extracts signatures and gives you the list of detected virii.

You will get stoned when you see how AVP claims to detect over 30,000 virii,
when it really detects less than 19,000 virii. (With last update
UP991105.AVC)

