Alright, enough with the suspense. The new feature we have been working with since last year is:
Everyone who knows me knows that I am terrible at keeping secrets, so I'm glad I can finally tell you about this
To make a long story short, we have developed a 100% heuristic anti-malware engine that is designed to detect all common types of Windows malware such as viruses, trojans and so on. And by developed, I mean that we have developed the engine from scratch, this not any old engine that we have simply licensed and modified.
So, is it any good? Well, I just did the following test:
I used 4485 clean samples (i.e. files that are not infected with anything) a total of 7.12 GB and 2799 malware samples, a total of 1.14 GB. These samples were all fresh, meaning that the engine has not been trained with any of these files.
The engine gave the following result:
I think that is a fairly good score. AV Comperatives (http://www.av-comparatives.org) is an independent organization that tests Anti-Virus products. They also do so called Retrospective tests which mean they will use an Anti-Virus product with one week old signature file to see how well it catches new viruses and other malware released during the week, this gives an idea how well the products' heuristic detection works. In their most recent test (http://www.av-comparatives.org/images/stories/test/ondret/avc_report22.pdf) the winner was Avira Anti-Virus with a detection rate of 69% of new viruses and of the 12 products tested, the mean score was 42%.
Anyways, the main design goal of this feature is not to be a full blown Anti-Virus product with all the bells and whistles. The main design goal is to create a complementary product to an Anti-Virus program. jv16 PowerTools 2010's Anti-Malware will not contain real-time scanning, it does not clean files, it does not play the piano. All it does, is tells you whether a file looks dangerous (i.e. infected with something) or safe. This makes the feature perfect for quickly checking a new application you have just downloaded.
As I said, the engine is purely heuristic, it does not use a database of any known virus signatures. It does, however, contain a
