Windows 7: Kaspersky defends false detection experiment.

Kaspersky Lab has defended its handling of a controversial experiment criticised by some as a marketing exercise of questionable technical value.

The Russian anti-virus firm created 20 innocent executable files, adding fake malware detections for ten of the sample, before uploading the files to online online malware scanning service VirusTotal. VirusTotal routinely distributes samples of suspect files submitted to the service, which provides a useful tool for security pros to identify malware strains, to other vendors.

Ten days later, Kaspersky reports, 14 other vendors had added detection for the files it had deliberately (and falsely) labelled as malign.