Antivirus results cheating investigation in progress

[+E.Worm Jimmy Subscriber¹]

I don't read AV test reports much anymore, but it seems the problem here is the testing agency. Shouldn't they just buy the software from a store like everyone else and test that version to ensure they aren't getting duped? Having any vender send you something for testing leaves room for gaming.

 

yeah, that would be the logical solution, apex.

 

 

why are they testing the version sent to them?     why not get the ones from the same place other people get them? it is not like they cost an arm and a leg.

[+Warwagon MVC]

Websites such as Malwaretips or MalwareUp cannot be taken seriously. Just like YouTube testers. They are nothing about armature people testing antiviruses using a VM. Real malware testing needs to be performed on a real machine by a knowledgeable person.

 

What's wrong with that? They are using the AV and testing it with malware. Whats the issue?

[trag3dy]

I've been using it for a while and so have my brother and sister with no issues. It seems to work great. I'll continue using it.

[GTR707]

Go ahead people. Keep using an antiviruses that was caught cheating. Keep using an antivirus that has been in and out of court for years. Should we also start trusting criminals? 

 

https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1251588-qihoo-360-wanring/

[trag3dy]

Go ahead people. Keep using an antiviruses that was caught cheating. Keep using an antivirus that has been in and out of court for years. Should we also start trusting criminals? 

 

https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1251588-qihoo-360-wanring/

 

Sounds like a plan.

[Lord Nite]

To me, you sound like a Jehovah's Witness that continuously goes to the same persons door and wonders why they keep slamming it in their face.

 

Get off your soapbox already and quit.  If people want to continue using the program, let them.  If they don't have a problem with it, why keep pushing your views down their throat?

[Jaybonaut]

Go ahead people. Keep using an antiviruses that was caught cheating. Keep using an antivirus that has been in and out of court for years. Should we also start trusting criminals? 

 

https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1251588-qihoo-360-wanring/

I don't use it, but now I want to on purpose.

[Rippleman]

Go ahead people. Keep using an antiviruses that was caught cheating. Keep using an antivirus that has been in and out of court for years. Should we also start trusting criminals? 

 

https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1251588-qihoo-360-wanring/

 

This decision to modify the results by using a custom version could be the result of one persons actions who don't represent the rest of the company.

[n_K]

The hate campaign in this thread is brilliant comedy!

 

People can make their own decisions on if they trust an AV vendor/product without you boasting about what you think you know. If the tests showed that american AVs cheated and the chinese AVs did really well, would you still have posted this thread or would you have cowered and tried to deflect?

[+Warwagon MVC]

The hate campaign in this thread is brilliant comedy!

 

People can make their own decisions on if they trust an AV vendor/product without you boasting about what you think you know. If the tests showed that american AVs cheated and the chinese AVs did really well, would you still have posted this thread or would you have cowered and tried to deflect?

 

Exactly.

 

 

[oldtimefighter]

And yet you are using a Chinese made phone, typing in this topic using Chinese made hardware.

 

You know where my phone is made? You are not only a genius but also a psychic! Actually, it's a Nexus 5 put out by an American company (Google) and it's made in South Korea. The Snapdragon chipset used in it (and most phones) is owned by a Amercian company and made in Taiwan I believe. Thanks for your concern...

 

The rest of your comment was just crazy nonsense but yet you were afraid we wouldn't be able to understand what you were saying? Condescending much? Please don't bother trying to "educate" us in the future.

[gameboy1977]

this thread seem interesting to me about some AV products are not honest.

[+Warwagon MVC]

 

You know where my phone is made? You are not only a genius but also a psychic! Actually, it's a Nexus 5 put out by an American company (Google) and it's made in South Korea. The Snapdragon chipset used in it (and most phones) is owned by a Amercian company and made in Taiwan I believe. Thanks for your concern...

 

The rest of your comment was just crazy nonsense but yet you were afraid we wouldn't be able to understand what you were saying? Condescending much? Please don't bother trying to "educate" us in the future.

 

The phone might be made in South Korea but the chips in the phone might come from china.

[oldtimefighter]

I've also seen threads on malware forums were once a day they release a virus pack and everyone scans it with their favorite AV. 360 always scored 96 to 98%

 

http://malwaretips.com/forums/virus-exchange-malware-samples.104/page-2

My reply will be to you warwagon because you seem to be a level headed person... I don't really care about the cheating and never questioned if 360 Total Security is good software or not. My issue with it is it's a Chinese company that codes it. The Chinese government is known to be able to interfere with any company in it's borders in any way it sees fit. China is not really friendly toward most of the western world. Agree so far? I am afraid about back doors in the damn software. Yes, the NSA is known to, in some cases to be able to make Amercian companies to do certain things but... I have rights here but I have zero rights with something made in China.

 

Vaild point? Maybe?

[oldtimefighter]

The phone might be made in South Korea but the chips in the phone might come from china.

What chips? I just said the main chipset in made in Taiwan. Regardless, any thing put in a Nexus phone in over seen by Googe and LG (South Korea) who are putting their name on the line. Who is Qihoo 360?

[TAZMINATOR]

What chips? I just said the main chipset in made in Taiwan. Regardless, any thing put in a Nexus phone in over seen by Googe and LG (South Korea) who are putting their name on the line. Who the is Qihoo 360?

 

Warwagon said the chips might come from China..

 

Taiwan is Republic of China.

[+Warwagon MVC]

I have rights here but I have zero rights with something made in China.

 

Judging by the snowden documents, you could have fooled me.

[DeusProto]

360 is still the best and trounces overpriced payware. So you just need to enable the Bitdefender engine and disable QVM to get the results that AV-C showed. You should ALWAYS go through a software's options and change them to common sense best settings. 

 

Not only do you have to pay exorbitant prices to use some popular inferior AV software, but you have to pay YEARLY per PC.. No thanks I'll stick with superior (when settings are changed from default) FREE anti-malware software. 

 

I've had no false positives with 360, and it has kept me protected on 5 devices - completely free - without any problems for 2 years now. I don't regret for one second not paying $1000 to get expensive AV software for my 5 devices in those 2 years. 

 

I have tried one of the numerous giveaways of Bitdefender Internet Security, and while it also had no FPs it brought my system to a crawl, caused dropped connections, timeouts, weird behavior with HTTP transactions, weird SSL certificate issues even with the firewall disabled. It also caused massive FPS drops in games, and made games load off my SSD so slow it was as if they were loaded off a 5400 RPM HDD. 

 

Nod32 and Kaspersky have caused FPs and one [i forgot which] even tagged mIRC as malware and I had to reinstall mIRC because it deleted mirc.exe. Both caused issues with connections too - if I had a torrent client running I would eventually have to reset my network adapter because new connections couldn't be established. It caused FPS drops in games, and both slowed down the loading of games perceptively. 

 

So with Qihoo 360 you can get Bitdefender's decent engine with vastly superior I/O code that doesn't bring your system to its knees. 

[Copernic Reporter]

@01Michael10

 

I wasn't trying to educate you or any other users; I was just paraphrasing GTR707 words from here.

And the same goes for the ''yet you were afraid we wouldn't be able to understand'', my reply wasn't addressed to you or others but just to GTR707, and I apologize for the misunderstanding.

 

As for the ''Who is Qihoo 360'':

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qihoo

https://www.nyse.com/quote/XNYS:QIHU

 

Revenue $1.39 billion (2014)
Profit  $222.8 million (2014)

 

So yes, it's about a lot of money.

[GTR707]

360 is still the best and trounces overpriced payware. So you just need to enable the Bitdefender engine and disable QVM to get the results that AV-C showed. You should ALWAYS go through a software's options and change them to common sense best settings. 

 

Not only do you have to pay exorbitant prices to use some popular inferior AV software, but you have to pay YEARLY per PC.. No thanks I'll stick with superior (when settings are changed from default) FREE anti-malware software. 

 

I've had no false positives with 360, and it has kept me protected on 5 devices - completely free - without any problems for 2 years now. I don't regret for one second not paying $1000 to get expensive AV software for my 5 devices in those 2 years. 

 

I have tried one of the numerous giveaways of Bitdefender Internet Security, and while it also had no FPs it brought my system to a crawl, caused dropped connections, timeouts, weird behavior with HTTP transactions, weird SSL certificate issues even with the firewall disabled. It also caused massive FPS drops in games, and made games load off my SSD so slow it was as if they were loaded off a 5400 RPM HDD. 

 

So with Qihoo 360 you can get Bitdefender's decent engine with vastly superior I/O code that doesn't bring your system to its knees. 

 

Duh..............You cannot disable the QVM engine. No such thing as over priced payware. Ever heard of shopping for deals? You can get a 1 year license for most products for $5-8

@01Michael10

 

I wasn't trying to educate you or any other users; I was just paraphrasing GTR707 words from here.

And the same goes for the ''yet you were afraid we wouldn't be able to understand'', my reply wasn't addressed to you or others but just to GTR707, and I apologize for the misunderstanding.

 

As for the ''Who is Qihoo 360'':

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qihoo

https://www.nyse.com/quote/XNYS:QIHU

 

Revenue $1.39 billion (2014)

Profit  $222.8 million (2014)

 

So yes, it's about a lot of money.

 

I am so glad you feel the need to use profanity. 

[DeusProto]

Duh..............You cannot disable the QVM engine. No such thing as over priced payware. Ever heard of shopping for deals? You can get a 1 year license for most products for $5-8

 

I am so glad you feel the need to use profanity. 

Actually you can. QVM is cloud based so you just need to use the hosts file to block the hosts it relies upon and it is effectively disabled.

 

I monitored 360's processes with ProcMon and a debugger attached and found that if it cannot contact its servers the QVM module will not enumerate files. 

 

Also Qihoo 360 is working on a GUI option to disable it and it will be in the next major stable version according to their Google Plus page. 

 

You can also make a 0-byte file that replaces its QVM definitions database and deny all write access to it to effectively shut off the QVM module. 

[Doli]

...

 

I am so glad you feel the need to use profanity. 

 

Copernic was quoting 01Michael10.

Hint: The quotation marks

 

What chips? I just said the main chipset in made in Taiwan. Regardless, any thing put in a Nexus phone in over seen by Googe and LG (South Korea) who are putting their name on the line. Who the f*ck is Qihoo 360?

[GTR707]

The hate campaign in this thread is brilliant comedy!

 

People can make their own decisions on if they trust an AV vendor/product without you boasting about what you think you know. If the tests showed that american AVs cheated and the chinese AVs did really well, would you still have posted this thread or would you have cowered and tried to deflect?

 

I think you need to do your research. Get your facts straight and come back. Qihoo cheated period. Qihoo did not submit there English version. They submitted an lettered version of their Chinese product. Every test it was the Chinese product. AV Comparatives and AV Test.org have never tested 360 Total Security as featured on this site. 

[GTR707]

Actually you can. QVM is cloud based so you just need to use the hosts file to block the hosts it relies upon and it is effectively disabled.

 

I monitored 360's processes with ProcMon and a debugger attached and found that if it cannot contact its servers the QVM module will not enumerate files. 

 

Also Qihoo 360 is working on a GUI option to disable it and it will be in the next major stable version according to their Google Plus page. 

 

You can also make a 0-byte file that replaces its QVM definitions database and deny all write access to it to effectively shut off the QVM module. 

 

So if the QVM engine can be disabled then that means your classically using Bitdefender or Avira? So why use 360 anyways. You cannot disabled the QVM engine entirely which is what Qihoo did to skew the tests. 

[DeusProto]

So if the QVM engine can be disabled then that means your classically using Bitdefender or Avira? So why use 360 anyways. You cannot disabled the QVM engine entirely which is what Qihoo did to skew the tests. 

Because Bitdefender costs money, and the free version is so gimped that it barely provides the protection of an on-demand scanner. But I have used the paid version via giveaways and it brought my system to a crawl. I couldn't multitask due to HDD thrashing, unpacking RAR files took 4 times longer, loading games off my SSD took the time of a conventional HDD, CPU usage  through the roof, choppy video playback when playing from Bluray ISOs, etc. 

 

With Qihoo 360 you get their engines with VASTLY superior performance that is near transparent and not perceptively slower. I can game, I can video edit, I can unpack files, my SSD feels SSD speed, I don't see its background processes shooting to 100% CPU, etc.