Antivirus Software – What You Need To Know

If you haven’t already, register a username for yourself so you can discuss this topic in our Outsourcing Security forum.

Anti-virus software is one of the most important programs that you could ever install — not only to get rid of existing viruses, but also to prevent your computer from catching one in the first place.

What is Antivirus Software?

Antivirus software is a program that’s designed to find and clean or delete viruses from your computer. It first scans the contents of your files and looks for programming code that’s known to cause damage – and then second, it deletes that code. Since antivirus software has no way of knowing what kind of code is damaging, it searches for match between what’s found in your files against what’s found in a virus database. If a match is found, the program identifies a virus.

This makes the database’s age of an antivirus software program extremely important. To be effective, the database must be constantly updated with newly found malicious code. If you were to install antivirus software onto your computer for example, that accessed an infrequently updated database, chances are that it wouldn’t find any of the newer viruses and it would leave your PC infected.

Upon Finding A Virus

Security Hire Top U.S.A. Security coders w/ ExpertRating status and more.

justoutsourcing

If an antivirus program finds a virus on your computer, it will first isolate the file that contains the virus and then second, quarantine it so that the file doesn’t activate and start infecting a bunch of other files. Once the program is finished quarantining all the infected files that it found, the antivirus program will delete them.

It isn’t easy to find viruses as they continually become more and more advanced over the years. That’s why antivirus developers depend on the contributions of their infected counterparts. People whose PCs have been infected with a virus may share their affected files with anti-virus developers in an effort to update their databases although many of these databases are automatically updated without much user participation.

The Scanning Process

It just isn’t effective to scan our systems with an antivirus program every now and then. To successfully fight viruses, we really need to scan our computers on a daily basis and depending on how you use your computer, you may need to scan it several times a day. Multiple scans are especially important if your computer is part of a network, if your computer hosts a website, or if you download a lot of software.

To make things easier, almost all antivirus programs automatically scan a system as soon as it’s turned on. This is an important step towards fighting the viruses that linger in a computer’s boot sector. Viruses in this particular area do their damage before the PC’s operating system loads up and they continue to do their damage in a system’s registry or throughout the computer’s usage.

At this point, they can attach themselves to other files and email messages, or they can replicate themselves to the point where they make computer usage impossible.

Additional prompts for scanning include downloading new files or email and maintaining or hosting server websites. Should you use mobile devices (USB products, Palm Pilot like devices, writeable DVD and CD-ROMs for example), your antivirus software program should scan them as well.

Current events can be found in our Antivirus Software News section.

It helps to have a good view of how antivirus software can effect the things that we’re presently involved with because without this understanding, we create unfortunate opportunities to not only damage our own systems, but also damage an entire network of computers.

And today’s society is just too dependent on computers to run this risk. So please install Macrovirus On-Call or MacroAntiVirus if you haven’t already done so. If you’ve already installed one, we thank you and merely ask that you keep it updated with the latest protection.

External Resources:

1. Computer Viruses and Anti-Virus Warfare
2. Anti-Virus Tools & Techniques for Computer
3. A Case Study of the Computer Antivirus Industry