What is antivirus software?
Antivirus software is a computer program which is usually installed on your computer and helps to detect, or prevent and or take action to remove malicious software programs, such as Viruses, Trojans and Worms. You can help protect your computer against viruses by using antivirus software.
Computer viruses are software programs that are deliberately designed to have an undesirable effect on computer operation such as delete data, record or corrupt data and also to spread themselves to other computers and throughout the Internet or your local network.
Antivirus should have an auto update feature and your antivirus software should be updated regularly using this to help prevent the most of the current viruses.
How Viruses are detected?
- Signature based detection is the most common method for detecting viruses, malware and other malicious software. To identify viruses and other malware, antivirus software compares the contents of a file to a dictionary of virus signatures which are downloaded when the antivirus performs its updates. Because viruses can embed themselves in existing files, the entire file must be searched and appropriate action is taken if necessary.
- Heuristic-based detection methods, like malicious activity detection, can be used to identify unknown viruses which are currently not in the antivirus database.
- File Emulation is another heuristic style approach. File emulation involves executing a program in a virtual environment and logging what actions the program performs. Depending on the actions logged, the antivirus software can determine if the program is malicious or not and then carry out the appropriate disinfection actions.