Nearly VB 100%

Near misses.

In the recent Windows XP comparative review (see VB, June 2006, p.11), VB reported that VirusBuster failed to achieve the results required for a VB 100% award. After discussion with the developers, it was discovered that out-of-date virus identities had been provided with the product and that VB's tester had failed to acknowledge the warning messages suggesting that an update of the virus database was in order. While the results remain valid for the version of the product tested, VB has since tested the product using what would have been the most recent identities for the submission deadline of the test. The two ItW viruses that prevented the product from achieving a VB 100% at the time were caught - meaning that if the correct data had been supplied originally, VirusBuster would easily have achieved a VB 100%.

Moving on to the latest NetWare comparative (see VB, August 2006, p.15), an unfortunate series of miscommunications resulted in Symantec's product missing the submission deadline. The product has since been run against the test sets and detected 100% of samples in the ItW test set without alerting on any false positives - had the product arrived in time to be included in the comparative review, it too would easily have achieved a VB 100%.

01 September 2006

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