Antivirus against old threats

In light of the fact that many Information Security companies post their end of year reports as well as predictions for the new year we thought it would be interesting to perform another AV statistics study. Many researchers and professionals are begining to accept the long overdue fact that Antivirus products are losing the battle against modern malware. We decided to test samples of old malware which was collected between 04/2001 and 11/2006. Altogether, there were 86 unique samples. These samples were submitted to Virustotal in 01/2008 and here are the results:

% Found  Total   Missed          AV
------------------------------------------------------
59.00    86      36              VirusBuster
64.00    86      31              eTrust-Vet
64.00    86      31              FileAdvisor
66.00    86      30              ClamAV
66.00    86      30              TheHacker
69.00    86      27              CAT-QuickHeal
69.00    86      27              Prevx1
75.00    86      22              AhnLab-V3
80.00    86      18              eSafe
87.00    86      12              Sophos
87.00    86      12              Sunbelt
89.00    86      10              DrWeb
90.00    86      9               Rising
92.00    86      7               Authentium
94.00    86      6               Ewido
95.00    86      5               Panda
97.00    86      3               AVG
97.00    86      3               Microsoft
97.00    86      3               NOD32v2
97.00    86      3               Norman
97.00    86      3               VBA32
98.00    86      2               Avast
99.00    86      1               Fortinet
99.00    86      1               Ikarus
99.00    86      1               McAfee
100.00   81      0               Symantec
100.00   86      0               AntiVir
100.00   86      0               BitDefender
100.00   86      0               F-Prot
100.00   86      0               F-Secure
100.00   86      0               Kaspersky
100.00   86      0               Webwasher-Gateway