AV products fail 64-bit Vista virus tests

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A host of anti-virus products for the 64-bit version of Windows Vista managed to flag up false positives in a recent test carried out by specialist testing company Virus Bulletin.

It found that three products submitted by Trend Micro all falsely identified a Microsoft development tool as spyware. Other products to generate false positives were Fortinet's FortiClient, Ikarus Utilities, and VirusBuster.

Of the 20 products sent in for testing, six produced false positives when scanning a set of known clean files. In doing so, the product failed to meet the requirements for VB100 certification.

John Hawes, technical consultant at Virus Bulletin, said that the items added to the organisation's set of known clean files this month mostly consisted of common items taken from the 'most-popular' lists of free download sites, "so it is a concern that the additions have caused such an upsurge in false detections."

"A false positive can cause as much disruption as a virus infection," said Hawes. "False warnings often lead end-users to delete valid files in the belief that they are some form of attack and the resultant damage can be significant."

He added that with many of today's products showing an increasing reliance on heuristic detection techniques, anti-malware vendors must "work hard to minimise false detections."

As reported by IT PRO, Microsoft was widely criticised earlier this year after its own AV product, OneCare, failed to attain VB100 certification on the 32-bit version of the Vista platform. It was a different story for the Redmond company as its enterprise product, Forefront, managed to achieve VB100 status for 64-bit Vista.

Trend Micro was unable to comment on the test at the time of publication.

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