My $.02 – Consumer Reports, AV and Virus Creation

It is well known at this point — in other words, this is old news — that Consumer Reports created new viruses to test current anti-virus products abilities to defend against unknown attack variants.

The question before us: Can we learn anything from this?

Fundamentally I do not see anything wrong with this testing. Perhaps the process of running new virus strains and new viruses through an AV product should be considered the equivalent of AV fuzzing.

Perhaps my perspective will change. But it will only change if it can be demonstrated that AV cannot capture new variants and unknown viruses (i.e., there must be existing signatures in order to capture malware). If this is true, then we must define and accept the limits of AV protection.

Might it be possible to use the Consumer Reports technique to build a better heuristic model and increase the AV signatures to include possible new strains?

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In addition:

There is a distinction in the AV world between: “proactive testing” and “retrospective testing.” It is not wise to think that these are equivalent testing models. While both are necessary, retrospective testing lacks the ability to project possible future trends because retrospective testing focuses on the “past to present” trend analysis instead of analyzing the “present to possible future” trends.

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