A dirty little secret of the anti-malware industry is that the WildList doesn't prove a lot about a product.

Failure to find all malware in the famous WildList can cause an anti-malware product to fail VB100 certification. Sometimes this is scandalous, as when Microsoft's OneCare failed WildList testing last year to widespread derision. But what does the WildList really prove?

In fact, insiders in the anti-virus industry, especially vendors, are widely derisive of the WildList, looking on it as an outdated burden on their development. The malware in it is outdated and not representative of the true threats facing users.

There is an extraordinary amount of malware that was making headlines in 2004, back in the heyday of the mail worm. There's W32/BugBear.A-mm from 2002. Go all the way down to the bottom of the list and you'll find W95/Spaces.1445 from 2000. Yes, that's one of two Windows 95 viruses on the list.

Posted by Annette King in Virus & AntiVirus News at 12:54

The malware is being spammed out in emails that try to trick users by playing on their curiosity about a possible love interest, experts have warned

After a hiatus, the gang behind the Storm worm is attempting to exploit people's curiosity about a fictional love interest to tempt users into downloading the malware, according to security training organisation the Sans Institute.

Donald Smith, a security expert from the Sans Institute, warned on Tuesday that a Storm worm download site had been detected by security researcher 'DavidF'. A link that contained the site's IP address was being spammed out in emails, wrote Smith in a blog post.

Posted by Annette King in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 12:42