The Necessity of Installing AV Software Today AV software or anti-virus software plays an important role in detecting, preventing, and removing malware, computer viruses, computer worms, Trojan horses, spyware and adware. It is true the that the Internet has proved to be an excellent means of communication, but at the same time they are an easy target to computer viruses and worms that could cause great chaos to the networking system. Computer viruses and worms have the capacity to modify, delete and steal data, with worms also having the capacity to multiply and spread themselves to cause greater trouble. The necessity of installing AV software is urgent because it is quite possible that a virus or worm could have been in a computer a long time before one realizes it. This could leave your computer infected long before you take action for its prevention. So the proper functioning and storage of essential and confidential data requires the latest version of the software which can help to not only keep your personal computer clean and uninfected, but would also inform you of threats where prompt action is required. A variety of strategies can be employed in anti-virus protection using signature based detection involving searching for known patterns of data within executable code. But it is necessary to know that this does not always prove effective if the computer is infected with new malware. There are constantly new updates made to the software to counter such so-called zeroday threats. Some of them use heuristics to predict new threats. Generic signatures, one heuristic approach, has proved effective in identifying new versions or variants of existing viruses by looking at known malicious code, or slight variations of such code, in files. Some AV software has, in addition, the capacity to predict what a file will do by running it in a sandbox. It could also analyze what it does to see if it performs any malicious actions. The necessity of installing AV software on your computer for internet usage arises out of a need for computer safety and the protection of vital documents and files that could be damaged or lost forever. The two main ways that AV software works involve, firstly, that it scans for all the viruses that are specified in the virus dictionary.
Then it alerts the user having found them of their suspicious nature like port monitoring, spyware or data capturing. Then it takes action to get rid of infected files either automatically or on instruction from the user. Most good AV software will update these files automatically, which is achieved by having the software connect via the Internet to the vendors’ server for the regular downloading and installing of the latest virus patterns. I would say that anti-virus software is without doubt necessary for the effective use of computers and the Internet, but it does not come without drawbacks such as the slowing down of the computer. Along with impairing of computer’s speed, it could give prompts and make decisions that are very difficult for a layman to understand, thereby leading to confusion and security breaches. In addition, AV software that employs heuristic detection may sometimes not be able to achieve the right balance between false positives and false negatives, with both of them proving destructive. Lastly AV software running at the highly sensitive kernel level of the operating system creates a potential avenue of attack. Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with the cheap antivirus software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software