Saturday, March 10, 2007

Machine intelligence

We just completed some head to head testing of Robot Genius' web crawl data. We've built a fully automated process that downloads every Windows executable on the web (terabytes of data, now in the can), installs it on an analysis machine, and determines whether it is malware.

We compared our results for 8000 executable urls (something our farm can do in much less than a day) against the databases of two public security companies. The first is a leader in the web protection space, and the second is one of the 3 largest antivirus and desktop security vendors. The results of the second head to head comparison are below (in the first comparison the public company did even worse).

Conclusion: the Robot Genius defeats teams of hundreds of security engineers located in multiple countries.

Summary statistics:

Caught be RG: 100
Caught by leading AV company: 96

False negatives by RG: 4 (6 if you include Alexa toolbar, which we do not)
False negatives by leading AV company: 58

False positives by RG: 2, due to a dumb mistake that we have fixed
False positives in leading AV company data: 52 (50 if you consider Alexa toolbar bad, which we do not)

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