AntiVirus Basics - What you NEED to know!

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Your home is your castle, and your virtual home better known as your Personal Computer (PC) should feel just as secure. However, protecting both requires awareness against a multitude of intruders ranging from the merely aggravating to the truly dangerous. Just as you must guard against intruders breaking into your home or office to vandalize and pillage it, you must repel viruses and hackers trying to slip into your PC to wreak havoc and snatch valuable personal or company data. And just as telemarketers can interrupt your dinner, stealth ware-laden downloads and endless spam e-mail can ruin your appetite for going online.

You can protect your PC as you do your home or office, by strategic use of the right tools. Your antivirus program should be thorough, accurate, and fast. If it isn't, you simply won't use it--and neglecting this task is very dangerous. In any given month, between 200 and 300 viruses are circling the globe. That number comes from the Wild List, an internationally recognized monthly roster of viruses spreading "in the wild."

An antivirus scanner's main method for catching viruses is to compare suspect code against databases of known virus "signatures." These databases include current and previous Wild List entries as well as tens of thousands of "zoo viruses" that mostly exist in labs but use tricks that future viruses may employ. Scanners also use methods such as heuristics in an ongoing effort to recognize virus-like behavior in new threats.

Viruses today not only are more potent than their predecessors, but can spread faster. In the 1980s, boot-sector viruses passed via traded floppy disks. By the late 1990s, e-mail transported macro viruses in attached Microsoft Word documents.

Now the danger comes mainly from mass-mailing worms which are self-replicating viruses that can hijack e-mail address books and send themselves to multiple recipients. LoveLetter, for example, was a Visual Basic script virus. Now most mass-mailing worms are stand-alone Win32 programs, such as SirCam and Klez, and these programs make up the bulk of all virus infections. Macro viruses come in at a distant second, and script viruses come in a close third. Boot-sector viruses account for only about 1 percent of infections.

Armed with the knowledge that these threats do exist and that there are great ways to thwart these attacks you should feel comfortable surfing the web. Peace of mind is very important these days and programs such as McAfee Antivirus Software help to ease this burden. Click here to see my review of McAfee Antivirus and the advantages it brings to your freedom from malicious intent.

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