Virus Quantyty

[avatar2005]

Hi!
did anybody know, how many viruses are there in program virus database for now?
Tnx

[DavidR]

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.

[Dwarden]

Small tidbit ) http://www.avast.com/eng/vps_history.html
try count and You get little part of mosaic

[Lisandro]

This was discussed a lot in the past...

1. There are a marketing issue involved. Companies estimate the number of viruses by high.
2. There are different counts possible: variants, etc.
3. There is not an international rule for virus naming, so same virus could be consider one or more by other company.
4. Scanning settings are very important.
5. Active viruses (ITW) are really more important then the whole number.
6. Generic signatures and heuristic detections cannot be really counted as 'virus detection'.

Well, etc. etc.
Trust avast!

[IBK]

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