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Accuracy

Accuracy is extremely important in the use of all anti-virus tools. Unfortunately, all anti-virus tools make errors. It is the type of errors and frequency with which they occur that is important. Different errors may be crucial in different user scenarios.

Computer users are distributed over a wide spectrum of system knowledge. For those users with the system knowledge to independently verify the information supplied by an anti-virus tool, accuracy is not as great a concern. Unfortunately, many computer users are not prepared for such actions. For such users, a virus infection is somewhat frightening and very confusing. If the anti-virus tool is supplying false information, this will make a bad situation worse. For these users, the overall error rate is most critical.



konczal@csrc.ncsl.nist.gov
Fri Mar 11 21:26:02 EST 1994