Malware is growing to become more and more randomized, and one of the consequences of this is a growing risk of false positives in any anti-malware product. Just testing on more and more laboratory machines never covers the whole live situation out there though, so we thought about a different, more community-like, approach: we've decided to implement a distributed computing concept to back up our internal testing.

You may know existing distributed computing projects: Seti@home for example uses the power of a huge community to look for extra-terrestrial live, Folding@home uses a huge community as well to possibly find more understanding about diseases like cancer. Spybot-S&D Distributed Testing (SDDT) isn't helping you to make phone calls to Alpha Centauri, nor does it cure diseases, but then, it's also not really taking that much processing time away as if you would use them. It uses the same community power though: the results of the scans of many real live machines, maybe including yours, will help us make safer and even faster updates available!

This project has been available as a beta for half a year, and now we're looking for more participants. Don't be afraid of it slowing down your system - it's not working continuously as the aforementioned clients are, it operates in a user-defined interval, and then only scans small databases, taking a few seconds usually. You can also have it submit your scans anonymously, or, if you want to use the new feature to view any of your previous scan results in your User Control Panel on our forums, provide an email address.

If you want to help, feel free to head over to the forum and download the client. Also, expect more announcements regarding the quantity of detections as well next week...