AV Engines are not very effective at spotting web-based malware

There is every indication from sources internal to StopTheHacker.com and external sources comprised of web hosting companies, administrators, security companies and government organizations that the threat from web based malware is looming large and is only going to intensify in the coming years.

Website owners, and administrators, even website hosting companies are the directly affected ones. However, it is me and you, the web surfer, who visits supposedly benign sites which have been compromised by malicious individuals who are at great risk.

To protect the client, i.e. you, security experts rightly recommend antivirus (AV). These AVs are good at detecting pieces of code which have been classified and adhere to well known malicious behavior.  Consumers need to know that most of these AV engines are not tuned to detect web-based malware threats.

Below we present a small test we performed consisting of 159 unique pieces of web-based malware captured during the last few weeks by our detection systems. We compared four popular AV engines and found that none of them are very effective at detecting malware from compromised websites.

Note that all AV engines used were at the latest version available for our systems and were updates with the latest virus definitions. All samples used Javascript to execute their malicious content.

Brief highlights:
1. AV engines used: AVG, ClamAV, F-prot, Avast
2. None of the AV engines detected more than 11% of the malicious samples
3. AVG detected: 6.92%, ClamAV detected: 10.69%, F-prot detected: 10.06%, Avast detected: 2.52% of the samples respectively
4. Only one sample was detected by all four AV engines. This sample was extremely similar to a POC exploit code from milw0rm.com

This limited experiment shows that traditional AV engines have a long way to go when it comes to detecting web-based malware. Jaal uses proprietary detection technology which is based on artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms which can understand how malicious pieces of code behave and profile and classify them with high accuracy and recall.
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