AV Vendors suck

ISC published a disclaimer

Quote:

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Yesterday (http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?date=2004-11-12 ) handler of the day John Bambenek pointed out that VirusTotal removed several leading AV vendors from their scanning service. The Storm Center is not privy to the specific reasons for the decision at VirusTotal, and our choice of words on why there was a change is only an opinion. Regardless, most of the major AV vendors provide a free malware scanning service on their own home pages.

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i tend to think that if Virustotal became a way to compare AV softwares there might be instances of companies submitting files for scanning that the other companies couldn't possibly have sigs for. then each company would have to commit resources to stay ahead of the others or look bad and then if their caught doing this they really look bad. if i were a major software company id shy away from this too.

Sure, it's a bad idea for the vendors to be submitting malware to the site, but what about the rest of the malware hating world? I know I use the site all the time to try to get a handle on what I am looking at. I really don't care if the vendors look bad, so be it, we live in an increasingly capitalist world and competition drives capitalism. If they can't handle the competition..they should get out of the business. If they are slacking off, we as consumers deserve to have the option to compare current antivirus software. The point of the site is to have a better chance of identifying malware, leave it to the vendors to turn it in to something more than it really is. AV vendors suck.