4. What is Anti-Virus
Antivirus or anti-virus software (often abbreviated as AV),
sometimes known as anti-malware software, is computer
software used to prevent, detect and remove malicious
software.
Antivirus software was originally developed to detect and
remove computer viruses.
In particular, modern antivirus software can protect from:
malicious browser helper objects (BHOs), browser hijackers,
ransomware, keyloggers, backdoors, rootkits, trojan horses,
worms, malicious LSPs, dialers, fraudtools, adware and
spyware.
Some products also include protection from other computer
threats, such as infected and malicious URLs, spam, scam
and phishing attacks, online identity (privacy), online
banking attacks, social engineering techniques, advanced
persistent threat (APT) and botnet DDoS attacks
5. History
In the early 1980s, Internet security was
practically nonexistent. No large-scale
attacks had ever been attempted, and
network-based vulnerabilities were rarely,
if ever, exploited. T
his changed in the late 1980s with the
Morris Worm, the first known large-scale
attack propagated via the Internet.
Today, spyware, viruses, trojan attacks,
worms, and malware are all common
occurrences affecting nearly every
computer user at least once.
6. Anti-Virus Types
1. Firewall software: Analyzes incoming and outgoing data
packets on a network; that is, all the information sent and
received through the computer's network connection.
2. Network layer firewalls: are called packet filters. These
firewalls are the simplest of firewalls, and only allow
information packets to pass through the firewall if the
packet matches a specific set of rules.
3. Proxy servers: act as a firewall in that they inspect
incoming packets for specific applications and block all
other requests.
4. Application Layer Firewalls: These firewalls inspect all
packets for specific protocols, such as FTP and browser
traffic.
7. Antivirus Software
Antivirus software identifies, prevents, and removes
malware from a computer system.
Malware is any number of viruses and software bits
that intend to harm the computer or steal
information, such as viruses, adware, rootkits,
backdoors, hijackers, keyloggers, spyware, trojans,
and worms.
Modern antivirus software employs several methods
to detect and remove malware. However, no
antivirus software can detect and prevent all possible
malware.
8. Types of Antivirus Software
1. Signature Based Detection: The antivirus software can
then scan each file on the computer's hardware and memory
and compare the entire file, as well as small sections of
each file, against the virus signature database.
2. Heuristics: To help protect computers against new and
unknown malware, heuristic detection algorithms were
created.
3. Rootkit Detection: Rootkits are a particularly nasty form
of malware.
4. Real Time Protection: Most antivirus software provides
real-time protection, often under any number of clever
synonyms such as resident shield, background guard,
autoprotect, and so on.
9.
10. 5. Antispyware: software often provides real-time
protection, just like most antivirus software does.
Additionally, just like most antivirus software,
antispyware software relies on up to date spyware
signature definition files to work properly.
12. Conclusion
Antivirus and security software has become an essential
part of modern computer use.
Firewalls inspect the data flowing between the computer
and the Internet and attempt to filter out information
packets that seek to exploit vulnerabilities.
Antivirus software has become quite sophisticated, often
involving signature-based detection methods, heuristic
detection methods, rootkit detection, and real-time
scanning to prevent computers from being infected with
malware.
Antispyware software specifically protects the computer
from spyware, which can slow down the computer's
performance.