Last week AV-Test entered the 50 millionth piece of malware into its malware database. The newest threat is a PDF file that exploits a vulnerability in Adobe Reader in order to infect Windows systems, furthering a trend of attackers exploiting third party applications instead of operating systems or browsers.
At the time of the article written by The H last week, only 5 antivirus engines had detection of this malware through heuristics, while other engines had only possible behavioral recognition to protect users. Similar situations occur each time a new threat emerges, which according to AV-Test, was more than 20 million times in 2010 alone. But it isn't the same 5 engines with the earliest detection for every threat, and sometimes it's only one engine with detection (such as VirusBlokAda with Stuxnet).
So how do you choose a solution to protect against the newest threats? Because no engine can be the first to detect every new threat, multi-scanning solutions offer the best possible detection rates. With multi-scanning solutions such as OPSWAT's Metascan technology, multiple antivirus engines scan simultaneously, so that if any of the engines included have early detection for a threat, your system is protected. For the threat discovered last week, any multi-scanning solution that included one of the 5 engines with early detection would offer the needed protection.
