‘That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.’ So wrote Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet. And anyone with even the briefest experience of the anti-malware industry will know that a single piece of malware can have several different names.
In the 1990s, former editor of Virus Bulletin Ian Whalley created the VGrep tool in an attempt to help users navigate the confusing world of virus names. The tool ran a number of anti-malware scanners across a large collection of infected files and parsed their output into a simple text database.
Back when the tool was created, the number of known viruses was many times smaller than it is today, and the tool functioned very well for many years (maintainance of the VGrep database was subsequently taken over by McAfee’s Dmitry Gryaznov). Since early 2009, however, the system has more or less lain dormant – until now.
This month sees the launch of a new generation of VGrep, operating with a database maintained by provider of threat analysis tools ReversingLabs. Improvements to VGrep include:
New malware will be scanned and detection changes updated twice daily.
Scanners from 25 vendors will be supported.
Over 80 million malware samples will be incorporated.
Advanced search engine technology will support speedy queries, obviating the need for VGrep database downloads.
VB is delighted to be able to offer the new, improved VGrep, and we look forward to hearing your feedback. VGrep can be accessed at http://www.virusbtn.com/resources/vgrep/.
