images.jpegOn August 8th @ 6pm at LinuxWorld, we’ll be holding the AntiVirus Fightclub! What is the AntiVirus Fightclub? Its an all-out public test of different anti-virus vendors to see how they really compare. Why would we do this? Because you will be surprised by the results.


The background: Two years ago we decided to add antivirus to our network gateway platform. As usual when adding an application, we did a ‘bake-off’ of the varying solutions available plus a few well known ones for good measure. My theory was that anti-virus was fairly commodity and that all vendors would be roughly equal. I couldn’t have been more wrong!

Some vendors were embarrassingly terrible (clearly selling dead donkies), and yet the little ole’ open source project, ClamAV, was among the best of them. We decided to go with two solutions so the user could choose, one of which was the open source solution ClamAV. We couldn’t be happier with the performance of ClamAV.

A year later, I was talking to one of the testing labs about testing our appliance (for the little sticker certifications). They were eager to work with us for firewall and VPN testing, yet refused to test any antivirus functionality because we were using “the open source solution.” They would not explain why they refused to test ClamAV, although they did offer that they had tested it and it had done poorly relative to the commercial solutions. Given our testing and customer data had shown the exact opposite, we asked for their test results – to which they repeatedly refused. They also repeatedly refused to provide the test data set so we attempt to verify any results they had shown in their labs.

I’m left to assume that the testing labs are biased in their testing, probably because they get their funding from the commercial vendors that pay them for testing. Their customers surely wouldn’t be happy if the testing labs claimed a free and open source solution was better.

Open source antivirus hasn’t gotten a fair shake, and all the meanwhile some commercial vendors escape with selling products so poor it should be considered a scam to sell them.

So what’s the AntiVirus Fightclub? Its a public & transparent test of the performance of many virus vendors on a real-world test set. This is not a 0-day virus test. This is not functionality comparison. It is a simple test of whether or not each vendor’s virus engine catches viruses that have been in the wild in wide distribution.

If you happen to keep old viruses around that you’ve found in the wild (or have been emailed to you), please submit them here. Submissions will be taken at the show as well, and all results and tests can be verified independently after the show.

edit: The results are in!