Total number of viruses detected?

[TC17]

When look at the Avast Home database and do a blank search to bring up all the viruses detected by Avast, it shows 22,554 listed.

However Norton says it detects 63,351.  Why does Avast detect so many less?  Or am I missing something?

The Norton web page where it shows how many it detects is here:

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/download.html

[raman]

It is not easy to say. I think it has somthing to do in wich way you count Viruses. You can say one Programm identify the whole "family" of a Virusconstructor with one signature. So what does that mean? Does it detect one Virus or thousand? The same with diverent Variants of Malware. Count it as one or as many? Avast uses  trojan-gen to detect different malware.

Maybe avast detects a bit less Viruses like Norton does, but not so much less

[Pavel Baudis]

These numbers are just total crap which is time to time discovered by someone's marketing department - but as a whole the BIG NUMBER game (which was very popular about ten years ago) is over for a long time.

Everything depends on how you count the viruses and virus families. I'll give you an example: several years ago someone sent to one AV company about 15000 "new" viruses which were actually created by some silly virus generator. Most AV companies did detect most of them (we did all for example) but some immediately increased their known virus counters by +15000 while others not.

Our number says how many different viruses/families are detected by avast!. But you can't compare these numbers from different products - it does not say you anything about the actual detection rate, about support, about update frequency and about all the important stuff which is critical in the today's AV protection...

[Pavel Baudis]

Raman: Maybe avast detects a bit less Viruses like Norton does, but not so much less

Why do you think that avast detects less viruses than Norton does   ??

Do you have any materials to support such statements   ??

PS: According to the our internal tests avast has better detection rate than Norton (but as they are our INTERNAL tests their results cannot not published).

[raman]

<g> I said "Maybe", i did not say that it does. It is useless to discuss that, like it is useless to discuss the amount of Virus. I think Norton was able to make test wherein NAV get a higher detection rate.

I think it is more important to find Viruses who are realy (or almost)ITW than finding Zoo Viruses.

[Pavel Baudis]

Raman: I totally agree - you can see it from the smiles above.

The most important thing today is the ability to react to the new threads and the speed in which we (AV companies) are able to deliver the updates to you (users). Here I see really big advantage of avast! and its incremental and completely automatic iAVS updates  

[TC17]

Ok thanks for the replies.  I had been using Norton previously but had problems recently with it continually telling me ""Cannot read subscription data.  Please re-install Norton Anti-Virus"  Even though I paid for the program and reinstalled it, which seemed to only temporarily fix it.  

It looks like Avast also uses somewhat different names for the same viruses of other companies? (I assume they all do that I guess)

Also will Avast be adding the porn dialer (900 number) trojan to its list?  I don't have that virus/trojan, but my brother seems to get that a lot on his computer.   I've noticed McAfee and Norton do have it listed recently.

I do like Avast, it seems very nice, and I like the added speech option.

[raman]

For the Dialer things you should use AD-AWARE ( www.lavasoftusa.com ) or Spybot http://security.kolla.de/

[mantra]

dear Pavel
only a question
it's my curiosity

did u make a compare with kaspersky?
"norton is small crap for me"

[Pavel Baudis]

did u make a compare with kaspersky?

Yeah, we did - there are the differencies in tenths of percent in the detection on the complete database we have. The detection rate is really VERY VERY similar - so the number of viruses or the number of names is truly irrelevant...

[mantra]

uau
great
 
i consider kaspersky & avast the best av

in some side avast is better

"the state of HEART/ART" yes?

[Lisandro]

Forget NAV. The subscription troubles are so often that everybody will leave it in the future... Stay with avast. I tryed McAfee, Nortan and AVG. No other antivirus has the same features. Anyway, for a technical comparison of virus detected, see: http://www.av-test.org

McAfee seems to be better than NAV.