VGrep: the rose revived

Virus Bulletin relaunches anti-malware name matching tool.

‘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

together with IT-Security Institute

AV-TEST

. 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

here

.

Posted on 11 October 2012 by

Virus Bulletin