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NEWS FROM THE LAB - Wednesday, June 13, 2007
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Dang Posted by Mikko @ 06:17 GMT

VB100

We failed in the latest Virus Bulletin VB100 test. This is quite unusual for us. Since 2003, we've passed the VB100 test 16 times and failed once – this time.

So how come we failed? Because we shipped them a product with an old update file.

An old built-in update file is not normally a problem. Whenever a customer buys our product from a shop, he gets old updates on the CD-ROM anyway (we nowadays ship around six updates a day). The first thing the product does when run is that it downloads the latest updates.

Problem is, Virus Bulletin does their tests on isolated test systems without network connectivity. So they always use the updates that were provided to them with the product.

Now, we are aware of this restriction and should have known better. So there really is no excuse for us failing this test. Too bad.

Because of the old update file, we only got 99,88% detection rate (as we missed one virus) and this caused us to miss the VB100 logo this time.

We asked John Hawes from Virus Bulletin for his comment. He said:

"After some investigation, we discovered that the product submitted for the test did not include the latest updates available at the submission deadline. After retesting with these updates in place, F-Secure comfortably detected everything on the WildList, and would easily have qualified for the VB100 award had the correct data been supplied. Their customers, with the benefit of automatic updates, would certainly have been protected by this solid and reliable product."

Thanks John.