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Andreas Marx gave a presentation at the Virus Bulletin conference in Vienna, and I’m posting it here for reference.

Paper here.

Presentation (PPT and PDF)*.

From Andreas:

During the Virus Bulletin 2007 Conference I gave a presentation on the topic “The WildList is dead, long live the WildList!”.

It actually confirms that some AV product tests are very problematic, especially, if they are only based on the WildList as reference. I’ve created some interesting statistics to show that the WildList cannot be used anymore (in it’s current state) to show how good or worse products are…

The feedback from the industry was quite interesting… for example, Panda has blogged that they strongly agree on my comments while Sophos disagrees that the WildList is not useful for testing purposes anymore:

Back from Virus Bulletin 2007 (Panda Research Blog)

Is the Wildlist still relevant? (Sophos Blog). I also saw a comment from an other AV tester here. And Authentium’s Eric Kumar has a blog up as well on the subject.

Alas, Andreas caught me on camera swigging some substance at the Virus Bulletin dinner. You can see one of the frightful pictures here.

Alex Eckelberry
* (Copyright is held by Virus Bulletin Ltd, but is made available on this site for personal use free of charge by permission of Virus Bulletin.)