Monday, February 28, 2011
What Is Antivirus?
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Every computer that is connected to the internet is vulnerable and exposed to many dangerous viruses, frauds and penetration of dangerous programs. To keep our computer safe and protect it from many troubles and expenditures, our computer must be protected by antivirus software. Antivirus is software that is used to detect, remove and prevent viruses, malware, Trojans, worms, spyware, adware and other computer threats. These malicious software programs are intentionally designed to record, corrupt or even delete data, to interfere with the work of your computer or spread through the internet to other computers.
In order to prevent your computer from the most current viruses, malwares and other malicious programs, you must have antivirus installed on your computer and update the software regularly. Usually all the antivirus software has an option for automatic update on a daily or even hourly base, depends which option you will choose. Antivirus software usually uses two different methods to protect your computer. Most of the antivirus software does not use these techniques separately but as a combination.
The first technique includes examination of files by referring to a virus dictionary or database. This dictionary refers to viruses that have been identified by the author of the antivirus. The antivirus software must be updated in order to save information about the new viruses that appear on the internet. The second technique includes identification of a suspicious behaviour that might cause infection and it comes from different computers. This technique monitors the behaviour of all programs. For example, if some program tries to write data to an executable program, this is noticed as suspicious behaviour and an alert is sent to the user in order to take further actions.
Virus authors are always trying to be one step ahead than the antivirus authors and they create "polymorphic viruses", which modify and disguise themselves in order to avoid the matching of the virus's signature in the dictionary. This is why the second technique is better than the first one. From another side, the second technique sounds a lot of false positive detection, and many users become deaf and begin to ignore all the warnings and are tired of clicking the accept or ignore button. This is one of the reasons why most antivirus software stopped using this technique.
The competition between the virus and antivirus authors is always tough. The result from this fight is huge amount of viruses and equally large number of antivirus software. At the end every computer user has a dilemma which is the best antivirus and which one they should use in order to have the best possible protection for their computer. The variety of choice between free antivirus software and the ones that you need to pay for is endless as well as the forum discussions on this topic.
This post was written by: Franklin Manuel
Franklin Manuel is a professional blogger, web designer and front end web developer. Follow him on Twitter
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