Antivirus Software Guide Part 2
Thursday, December 14. 2006
How antivirus programs work
Antivirus (AV) is a term applied to either a single program or a collection of programs that serve to protect a computer system from viruses. The main component of an antivirus solution is the scanning engine . The intricate details of each engine vary, but all share the basic responsibility of identifying virus-laden files using virus signature files: a unique string of bytes that identifies the virus like a fingerprint. They view patterns in the data and compare them to traits of known viruses captured in the wild to determine if a file is infected, and in most cases are able to strip the infection from files, leaving them undamaged. When repairs aren't possible, antivirus programs will quarantine the file to prevent accidental infection, or can be set up to delete the file immediately.
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