The Numbers Behind Detection

Ever wonder why one antivirus vendor claims to detect xx,xxx number of threats, while another vendor claims xxx,xxx? Antivirus vendor McAfee has done a great job of breaking down the detection numbers to explain the disparities. As an aside, in that same blog post McAfee puts the number of malware families at 407,125 as of June 17th. That makes my comments in Tunnel Vision even more pertinent as it effectively drops the MSRT detection percentage from 5% of all families to .03%.