How an antivirus works – a complete guide

Over the years, antivirus software has become an essential part of Windows computers. With excessive threats in the online world, antivirus software provides multi-layered security.

If you want to know more about how antivirus software works to protect your PC, read on:

On-Access Scanning

Once you install an antivirus program, it keeps running in the background. It keeps checking every file you open and provides real-time protection against dangerous entities.

Before launching a program, it checks it for viruses, worms and malware. This helps it detect potential bad behavior.

Full System Scan

The antivirus software is quite active. It knows when you have downloaded a program with malicious activity and immediately runs a full system scan.

What’s more, a full system scan checks for dormant viruses that are hidden. Most antivirus software are scheduled to run a full system scan once a week. This provides you with complete peace of mind.

Virus Definitions

The antivirus software depends on virus definitions to carry out its security activities. These definitions files are downloaded quite often by your antivirus program. They allow your antivirus to match the activity with other viruses and malware and hence remove them.

Moving on, let’s take a look at virus detection techniques that an antivirus uses:

Signature-Based Detection

This type of detection technique helps an antivirus create a static fingerprint of a malware. This signature might be represented by a series of bytes or cryptographic hash.

This technique has been a part of antivirus programs for a long time. However, today the importance of this detection technique is decreasing as many cybercriminals have found a way around these signatures.

Heuristics-Based Detection

This technique involves detecting malicious activity by certain suspicious signs. For instance, it might look for junk code, or it might emulate running a file to see what affect it would have. The heuristic detection technique does this without slowing down your PC. However, the problem with this technique is that it can unintentionally flag a perfectly normal file as malicious.

Behavioral Detection

This one is the smartest of them all. It does not emulate the execution of a particular program to detect malicious activity; it observes the functioning of the program.

From detecting malicious code to modifying host files, it can perform a lot of safety functions. Taking a holistic approach, the behavioral detection technique has a better chance of finding activities with malicious activity.

With a complete understanding of antivirus software, ACMMO provides remarkable online antivirus technical support services. They also offer a variety of online computer tech solutions including software assistance, hardware assistance, printer repair services and so on.

Maria Harris is an expert writer and love to shopping and music.