Holiday Antivirus

As a follow up to our previous blog, What Antivirus do we recommend? Dec 2018.

LARG*net is part of an online community that collects and submits new viruses. This process allows new viruses to be detected quicker and improves global antivirus response time. We believe strongly in this initiative as it increases global online security.

There was a very large spike in new viruses over the holidays. Could it be that malware authors tend to have day jobs and now have time to develop new viruses or were these viruses released for the holidays on purpose?

Here’s an example of a new virus we uploaded.

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/176c4ddd83e2f9ad8cd581d4098824307733840b15197af790bb34a66b0e7294/detection

This malware targets DVR devices which are most commonly security camera systems. DVR systems are rarely patched and often accessible from the internet.

Here’s the breakdown on which antivirus caught each of the 750 new viruses we collected over the holidays.

New Virus Detections

In the previous blog, Dr Web, Kaspersky, and Zone Alarm were tied in first place with Avast/AVG, Eset, and Fortinet tied in 4th place.

Kaspersky has taken the lead after this new data while Zone alarm and Dr Web are not far behind. So far it's been a very solid performance by these antivirus developers.

If you choose any of these 3, you have chosen well.