Vast malware repository dedicated to testing and research

Frame4 Group is a Dutch company that has made its name specializing in different fields within IT: project and change management, process engineering, test coordination and quality assurance. Their customers include T-Mobile and British American Tobacco.

But it's because of their security services that they came to our attention, specifically because of the Malware Distribution Project (MD:Pro). This is a large security archive with a massive collection of downloadable malware and computer underground related information for the purposes of analysis, testing, research and development.

Now, we all know that the big anti-malware names out there have their own archives and file exchange mechanisms in place for years. However, they are not accessible to most other security providers or organizations that could have an interest in them, and are therefore spending enormous amounts of time, money and effort to gather resources for R&D as well as testing purposes.


In MD:Pro, the malware downloads are accessible on a paid subscription basis, and are offered only to corporate customers, such as IT security solutions providers.

Rob McCarthy, founder and Senior Software Developer at Lightspeed Systems has been using MD:Pro since December 2008, and he comments: "I use it every week - without fail. I use the virus samples in my work to first verify that our virus signatures are complete, and secondly to find similarities between different viruses. Some weeks most of the virus samples are completely new and so I am able to test our anti-virus software against threats that our customers haven't even seen yet" he says. "MD:Pro has proven itself to be the most complete source of virus samples that I know of. On a typical week they will supply me with 10,000 or more unique virus samples that I am unable to get from any other source - which means that our anti-virus solution can be tested more rigorously - ultimately making our product much, much better."

A talk with the founder

"Despite having a somewhat cloudy reputation in the anti-virus industry at the very beginning, we are a legitimate company providing a malware database for the mainstream security industry since 2006. We are working hard to become world's biggest and most trusted malware repository by gaining the trust of the IT security community." says Anthony Aykut, owner and Managing Director of the Frame4 Group, with whom we sat down to find out more about this project.

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