turboyoshi

I get that it may not be fair but can you explain more specifically what makes it an invalid test? How do I conduct a valid test of the software? A virus doesn't fall under the category of malware? It might seem like I'm arguing semantics but it's more than that. What you call yourself an anti-malware utility, then that gives people the expectation (and not an unreasonable one) that this includes viruses. This is probably a moot argument. Conficker clearly falls under the category of malware whether it's more specifically a virus or trojan or spyware or whatever isn't relevant. I may have used the wrong term in the first place by calling it a virus so it's pointless to argue whether mbam is an antivirus utility or antimalware. I can't tell customers "well, mbam isn't designed to work on this sort of infection but you should buy it anyway." I agree, and this is true of every other utility out there because no one tool catches everything. However, this hardly helps to answer my question. Thinking more generally, substitute any other malware for conficker in my test. What should I do to make it a more valid test? I need to give people confidence that this is a tool worth paying for. I'm not ragging on mbam, I like the tool, bought myself a copy for personal use and convinced my boss to buy a tech license for the company. I wouldn't have done that if I hadn't already seen the prog be successful in cases where others failed. Think of it this way, I'm a customer and have a machine that is infected with a well known piece of malware (or some close variant of it) and mbam isn't catching it, what now? If you were the tech who convinced me to buy this software, what would you do?

With all the recent hype about conficker, I decided to do a test run and see if I could infect a test pc and let mbam could find and clean this. I followed instructions similar to: http://johnhsawyer.blogspot.com/2009/04/go...-conficker.html then after I verified the infection was active, I installed mbam v 1.36. The auto update failed of course and I ran the offline updater mbam-rules.exe, file version is 1.1954.0.0. This may not be a fair test but my virus was never detected. I'd appreciate any thoughts you can offer as to how I can do a valid test or otherwise be able to prove to my customers that this product is effective. Yes, I know I could tell them to patch their systems with latest windows updates, run various other tools but that's not really the point. Thanks for your time. sean