You both have a point there, spg SCOTT and Dieselman,
The malcreants start out with launching a new morphed encrypted obfuscated protected version of the same malcreation. This is an ongoing battle between malcreant and the anti-malware makers....
So the cybercriminals test out their new malcreations for it to go under the anti-malware radar, right? What is adding detection for 0-days etc faster - re-scanning, re-scanning, re-scanning.
As soon as the undetected are flagged once protection against it is possible. So I think reporting flagged malware sites and new rogues to avast (and sending the info to virus AT avast dot com too), and posting it to be re-scanned is good. On the other hand this means protection "after the fact", the vulnerability gap is still there and stays open. How to close this further, deminish vulnaribilities used to infect by constantly updating the software of your OS and third party programs (secunia psi) and use sandboxing and script protection to be better protected even,
polonus