Computers have become so important to humans nowadays that it's hard to think what the world would have been without them. These nifty machines can be found almost everywhere and have since made life a whole lot easier. With the addition of the wonders of Internet, the importance of computers further increased. In recent years, humans grew more dependent on computers than they were before. Nowadays, computers are used for many purposes other than doing basic office works like typing and calculating. It is used for exchanging personal information, sharing valuable files, and communicating with important people. For this reason, computer security is a major concern for many people.
Interestingly enough, soon after the birth of computing machines and Internet is the emergence of various entities that prevent people from getting the maximum benefits out of computers and information technology. Computer viruses entered the cyber scene not long after computers were invented. These viruses, bearing the namesake of their biological counterparts, are destructive to computers because they mess with its system, applications, and data.
Just like the common cold virus in humans, cyber viruses also bring massive headache to the owner of an infected computer. Getting a viral infection on the computer system is a big waste of money, as well as time. As much as humans don't want to contract a sickness because of an airborne virus, nobody would want his computer attacked by a stealthy virus or malware. Just as humans need vitamins and other supplements to keep their immune defense systems strong, computers also need anti-virus softwares to protect themselves against malicious programs.
Incidentally, the very first known anti-virus was developed during the same decade self-replicating programs or viruses were first made. The forerunners of today's anti-virus softwares was the "Reeper", a program that removes copies of "Core Wars" in a computer system. Core Wars, which was a computer game written by a group of programmers, functions much like a virus.
In the following decades, another anti-virus was developed by a medical doctor, Peter Tippet, who also happens to run a software manufacturing company called Certus International Corp. After reading about the cyber viruses (Jerusalem2, Brain, and Lehigh) that plague computers during that time, Tippet studied how the viruses affect the system of a computer. After many studies, his company started making anti-virus softwares and made them commercially available for everyone. Symantec Corp. purchased the company in 1992 and included Tippet's anti-virus software in their product, the Norton Anti-virus.
An anti-virus software is an application that scans the computer system for viruses, identifies them, thwarts their activities, and eradicate them. Anti-virus softwares are also called virus scanners. There are many different, commercially available virus protection softwares in the market today, but all of them basically does the same thing, although they differ in approach.
Most anti-virus work by first scanning or scrutinizing all the files and applications in a computer system to locate viruses that match the descriptions in the software's built-in virus dictionary. Once a code segment of a possible virus matches the one in virus dictionary, the anti-virus have the option to do several actions like eradicating the virus to fix the contaminated file, isolating the file so the virus won't be able to infect others, and completely removing the contaminated file. This entire process is known as the dictionary method.
Anti-virus softwares that uses this approach need to be regularly updated so that the dictionary would acquire descriptions of new cyber viruses. An anti-virus that don't receive frequent updates would not be able to identify new breeds of cyber viruses and would not be able to find solutions for them, rendering it useless. Most of the commercially sold anti-virus programs already include an automatic online update to keep them posted on the latest virus developments.
One flaw of the so-called dictionary approach though is that once the virus contained disguised codes, it won't be recognized by the anti-virus software even though it pretty much functions the same way. The annoying fact is, authors of these viruses figured out a way for their creations to be overlooked by anti-virus softwares. Sophisticated viruses have polymorphic characteristics that enable them to modify themselves so that they would not hit a match with the dictionary.
With that, anti-virus softwares utilized another approach for scanning viruses. The suspicious activity method does not make use of a dictionary to identify viruses, but keeps track of the different activities of all computer applications. Once an application detects an activity out of the ordinary, the anti-virus would immediately mark it as an infection or a virus, and prompts the user to do actions against the identified virus.
This kind of approach works perfect against new cyber viruses that tend to append themselves to computer programs. But just like the dictionary method, this approach also has its weaknesses. More often than not, anti-virus softwares that use this kind of approach also manage to label or identify "good" programs as "evil", forcing the user to unwittingly delete or modify them. When this happens, snags may arise with applications which have lost their files to anti-viruses. In this case, the anti-virus software becomes more of a problem than a solution. For this reason, anti-virus designers try to avoid incorporating this approach to their products.
Other anti-virus softwares make use of both approaches in virus scanning. That way, an anti-virus gets the best of the two approaches. The other process would take off where the other one left off, making it an effective solution for computer systems' protection needs. Many reliable, modern anti-viruses available in the market today utilize both methods in their systems, giving a user more options and a better protection against cyber infections.
Anti-virus is also a term used for "good" or "benign" viruses that are deliberately installed in a computer system to fight off destructive viruses. These "anti-virus viruses" are rare and are believed to put up a weaker defense against "bad viruses". This is because more powerful, bad viruses may be able to convert these good viruses into vectors that can further wreak havoc inside a computer rather than fix them.
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