ITW and ZOO viruses

[StyleWarz]

I heard some rumour about the fact that avast databases only ITW viruses and no Zoo viruses... Is this true, and more important, is this the reason that avast! does not always score top-of-the-bill in tests...

Personally I think there's nothing wrong with just ITW detection, why spend a lot of time adding ZOO samples wich even are not around to infect customers pc's???

Another thought I had, keep up the good work, and can't wait till 5.x... Hope you guys improve the Trojan detection for this new version...

Greetings and keep up the good work,

Alex

[RejZoR]

There is no such thing as separate groups for ITW and ZOO. In fact there is NO ZOO malware. If it's malware it's bad and should be detected if possible (if sample is available). And malware can encountered one or another way.
I would rather say that ITW are today mainly worms which get in your mailbox (pushed),while ZOO are those that you can obtain from various WWW sites or P2P (those that you chose to download).
This is ofcourse just my definition of malware. True experts say otherwise,but i don't agree with them about ITW and ZOO stuff.

[Pavel Baudis]

I heard some rumour about the fact that avast databases only ITW viruses and no Zoo viruses...

This  is a nonsense, of course. There is about 1000 ItW viruses and many many more other viruses which do not spread among users. And of course avast! detects most of them.

Nearly all tests (including VB) are based not only on ItW viruses but also on others.

Hope this helps
Pavel

[StyleWarz]

@Pavel
Thanks for clearing this up, I was confused, so I asked it here But what's the exact story about ITW and ZOO viruses then?
Sorry for my many questions

[TAP]

In my opinion, avast! concentrates to detecting ITW 100% as it's the first priority for all antivirus software and avast! also detects other malware that are not listed as ITW by the WildList Organization's methodology (so-called Zoo or whatever you want to call them) but how much does avast! detect those Zoo?

I think it depends on the importance of the sample such as level of spreading and the danger of those Zoo. If it's Zoo but it brings real danger to avast!'s users and it's level of spreading meets the ALWIL's criterion so those Zoo are definitely detected respectively and if it does't meet it's not added or take to long to process.

And of course, each and every antivirus companies have their own criterion so that's why some antivirus software detect 99.99%, some detect 95% and some detect 90% at overall detection rates.

I believe that if avast! adds every malware sample that sent to virus lab into its database so avast! could detect at least 95%+ at overall detection rates as Kaspersky or McAfee too.

[Ulmo]

Hmmmm... Is there any reference about ITW, explaining what it is and such? I have found this comparison matrix where they have based their tests on 100% ITW, for comparing differnet AV solutions rate, and here are the results:

NOD32 AntiVirus 70%
Kaspersky AV Personal 48%
McAfee VirusScan 30%
Norton 14%
Avast! Pro. 11%

When considering only worms, backdoors and trojans, Kaspersky has a rate of about 99.4% (!)

Another comparison table showing the progression from quarter to quarter (showing if one vendor keeps on the top list thanks to their Virus list update mechanism): Link
 

[Lisandro]

Hmmmmm too.
Another virus comparison? In your first post? 
Can you introduce yourself? To whom you work?
It was discussed a lot of times before... I'm becoming tired