Around two-thirds of the locally-made anti-virus programs sold during the first half of this year failed to pick up malicious computer codes, according to a survey conducted by the Korea Communications Commission and the National Internet Development Agency of Korea.
Despite the so-called "denial-of-service" attacks last month that paralyzed major Web sites here, 84 local anti-virus programs out of the 134 surveyed failed to detect a single malicious code from the 1,500 online samples tested.
In addition, 18 programs in the survey showed errors while in the process of detecting malicious codes, and nine programs detected codes that turned out to be non-malicious.
However, compared to 32 such programs that detected wrong codes during the second part of last year in a similar survey carried out by KCC, this year's number is a relative improvement.
In the meantime, 15 programs successfully lived up to their marketing hype, detecting over 1,000 online malicious code samples out of the 1,500 samples offered during the tests, six more programs compared to the second half of last year during the KCC research.
The free programs in this category include V3 Lite, Alyac, Naver PC Green, Daum Toolbar and QOOK Internet Doctor.
The pay programs in this group were V3 365 Clinic, V3 IS 2007 Platinum, nProtect AVS 2007, NoAD2+, ViRobot Desktop, AntiStop, PC Dr., PC Dr. Plus, PCZiggy CIS and TC SpyDoctor.
The KCC said they are planning on giving respective companies with malfunctioning programs warnings to either to correct the problems by themselves or through cooperation with related companies.
The KCC also said it will conduct a similar survey on the effectiveness of anti-virus programs at the end of the second half of this year.
