Low False Positives ( 1 + 1 < 2 )
False positives, where files are reported as malicious when they are not, surface as a side-effect of any malware scanning solution, and can adversely affect business operations. To further complicate the issue, false positives are often only reported by a few anti-malware vendors at a time, and they are not always consistent or reproducible during testing.
False positive rates are reduced because many malware vendors work together through malware data sharing programs. This means that vendors work together to help codify true positives and false positives, so that overlapping vendor data has many fewer false positives, thus improving the results of using multi-scanning.
Also vendors share whitelist (trusted file) data. Our whitelist database accumulates the data from many vendors, which also reduces false positive detection rates.
Every engine returns some false positives, but it is incorrect to assume that using two engines results in double the number of false positives. Overlap in the detection of false positives using multi-scanning, limits the number of new false positives added by each new engine, as our multi-scanning research demonstrates. When we use more engines, the amount of false positives does go up, but only by a small, fractional amount, which is outweighed by the many benefits of multi-scanning.