On the Trustworthiness of the AV Industry and AV Tests
- Tuesday, February 2, 2010, 5:24
- Threat Research
- 2 views
Today, I was scanning through various industry blogs when I stumbled upon an entry from Kaspersky Labs. What was interesting was that under the veil of improving testing quality, the blog openly admitted that the organization in question had been trying to play tricks on competing organizations just to position itself more favorably among the media.
The organization explained that it deliberately created clean files and added fake detections in order to “show” that other vendors copied it. This was a risky decision. Across the industry, research organizations share a level of trust and participate in sample-sharing programs in order to protect customers, which for Trend Micro, is what always comes first. (I should just add here, that Trend Micro was not one of those companies affected by this, as we always QA our own detections and never rely on those of another vendor).
Aside from the organization’s cheap prank, we were very pleased that the other resounding message that came from the blog post was that it finally understood and supported the message Trend Micro has been promoting for a long time now—the need for change in testing methodologies to include real-world testing such as those delivered by NSS Labs.
The need to change testing methodologies was also a primary reason for the foundation of the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO), which aims to come up with more realistic and useful benchmarks.
This story really shows just how influential the media is on the antivirus industry in that even
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