PROS AND CONS BEFORE BUYING AN ANTIVIRUS

PROS AND CONS BEFORE BUYING AN ANTIVIRUS

Antivirus software is one of the oldest components of Internet security. As soon as criminals and hackers began using the Internet for their own malicious and illicit interests, antivirus companies began appearing all over the world to combat the spread of worms, viruses, spyware, and other harmful agents that were distributed to steal identifiers, steal data or drop websites just for fun.

A brief history of antivirus software

The first computer virus appeared in 1971 and was called the "Creeper" virus. He infected the PDP-10 mainframes of the Digital Equipment Corporation. He was finally arrested by another virus, called "The Reaper". The Reaper was not antivirus software in the strict sense of the word, but rather another virus created to eradicate the first.

The term "Computer Virus" appeared in a university paper in 1983. Several companies claimed to have invented anti-virus software around 1987, joined in 1988 by the German company Avira, with antivirus software dubbed "Luke Filewalker".

As PCs and the internet boom, international organizations and governments have been created, including the Computer Antivirus Research Organization. Its nomenclature was used by most antivirus companies for more than 10 years.

In 1991, Symantec released the first version of Norton Antivirus, and a few years later, Eugene and Natalya Kaspersky opened the Kaspersky Lab.

How do antivirus software work?

Antivirus software uses a detection technique based on the signature of malware. The signature of a virus is a unique code segment present in it. The virus code is therefore compared with all known malware signatures in a database accessible to the antivirus software. This database needs to be updated frequently, and there are even antivirus programs that constantly retrieve the latest updates from a database in the cloud, every time new malware is discovered and ranked .

The limits of antivirus software

Of course, even with a real-time database available, antivirus software can not catch all existing viruses. This must of course be the heart of any security effort on the Internet, but alas many malware is designed to avoid the trap of signing. Security specialists recommend using multiple layers of security to protect your system or network. This involves the use of email security programs that filter spam and harmful files; firewalls that prevent any particularly large file from entering the system, as they are often harmful and can overwhelm antivirus software by their large size;

Free antivirus software against pay

There are many options for antivirus software. Despite the adage that a free trick is never as good as its paid version, there is a substantial number of other cases in the world of anti-virus software. Many free versions of paid programs are excellent like bitdefender, especially if you simply use them for a personal computer, not for a network. But if you run a business, especially a business that you hope will grow over time, then the paid version makes a lot more sense.