Home What is a Trojan Horse? How we reviewed anti-trojans About us |
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The aim here was to get a measure of how thoroughly the vendors of anti-trojan programs update their signature files. This is of critical importance; the effectiveness of any anti-trojan product is, to a considerable degree, only as good as the quality of its database. At this site we've conducted three series of trojan tests: the first in August 2002, the second in August 2003 and the last in August 2004 so we have data on these products covering a fair time span . In the following table we compare the number of trojans in each products database in each year:
First up I should warn you not to focus too much on the absolute sizes of the trojan databases as they really can't be compared between products. To understand why you should be aware that some manufacturers count only unique trojans while others include variants of the same trojan. Additionally, some of the trojans included may be totally obsolete so they don't count as much in real terms as potent modern trojans currently in circulation. Finally not all the figures refer to trojans in the database, for example PestPatrol's seemingly impressive total looks less impressive when you consider it includes spyware and adware products as well as trojans. More important is the change in the databases size year to year. This gives a guide to which manufacturers are putting an effort into maintaining the currency of their databases. Even here you have to be wary about taking the numbers literally. Product vendors have become very aware of the marketing value of a large database for their products and it appears that at least two products: The Cleaner and PestPatrol, may have recently changed the way they count the number of trojans in their databases. Trying to bear these limitations in mind, we can still make some useful comments: First, the products that have shown the best trojan detection rates over the years: TDS-3 and Trojan Hunter have both shown consistent large increases in their databases year to year. We don't think this is any co-incidence at all. These vendors have clearly put a lot of effort into updating their signature files and the results show. They have also no need to engage in database inflation practices. Second Tauscan looks like they have been dragging the chain. We though the same last year about The Cleaner but on face value, they have appear to have lifted their game this year. Again it's no co-incidence that Tauscan has poor trojan detection rates this year while The Cleaner improved markedly on last years dismal performance. If a trojan is not in the vendors signature database it's extremely unlikely to be detected. Simple as that Thirds PestPatrol has a huge and rapidly expanding "pest" database yet was the worst performing product this year. The explanation is simple - most of their database entries are for adware, spyware and other non-trojan pests. . Finally, the two new comers a2 and Ewido appear to be off to a flying start with their databases. It will be interesting to see if they can keep up the momentum. We'll know the answer when we do our next series of reviews.
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