It’s crucial to know how your antivirus software identifies threats. Cyber-terrorists continue to develop more dangerous malware and viruses that can infiltrate computers, steal data, corrupt documents and cause other harm. Most antivirus programs are designed to identify and eliminate malicious threats before they can cause harm. They do this by analyzing your system files, your data and computer programs.
Traditionally, antivirus programs use signature-based identification to examine documents that come into your devices against the database of known signatures of viruses. This method looks for fingerprints and then matches the program or the file to the virus. It will warn you if the match is detected. It’s a useful method however, hackers continue to create new and diverse types malware. To recognize them, antivirus programs must keep their definition files current with the latest malware samples.
Encrypting malware’s payload is another method used by hackers to evade antivirus scanners. Once a virus has been encoded, it will be able to avoid scanners and signatures because it is not an executable. This is usually accomplished by attaching a small header to the virus. This lets it leap over the counter and execute the virus on the first opportunity.
Antivirus software employs a variety of methods to look for viruses, including heuristic-based detection and behavior-based detection. Heuristic-based detection resembles signature-based detection in that it studies the behavior of a program in search of patterns and patterns. With a trial and error approach Heuristic detection is able to detect viruses that are not found by the signature-based method.
