Most people at some point in their time using a computer will contract a virus. Some users will contract several and some will get infected multipule times. To help reduce the risk of contracting a virus please read the simple guide below.
3.1 Virus scanners what are they?
A virus scanner is a word nearly every computer users should know. They detect and remove viruses, which are nasty programs designed by computer users to do illegal actions on our computers, like steal passwords and banking details. The Virus scanners search the computer for these viruses and remove them. No one scanner can 100% gaurentee to remove everything.
3.2 Why do I need one?
Viruses usually do not target specific individuals. Your computer can be infected from anything, from looking at a perfectly innocent site to even just using a USB flash pen that was used on an infected comptuer.
3.3 How do they work?
The most common method that Antivirus scanners use to catch viruses is looking for known viral code and/or files in something similar to a virus dictionary, which are known as definitions. Most antivirus scanners also use another method called Heuristics. This is where the scanner looks at files and judges if they are suspicious or not by their actions.
Once a file containing Viral code is identified, the virus scanner will usually allow the user to take one of three actions:
- Attempt to repair the file by removing the virus itself from the file,
- Quarantine the file,
- Delete the infected file.
There are many vendors on the market selling antivirus. At the moment the leaders in the market are:3.5 Where can I look up more?
Our antivirus forum can be found here: http://gladiator-antivirus.com/forum/index.php?showforum=213
For some extra information about Antivirus software look here:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_antivirus_software
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antivirus_software#Approaches
- http://www.av-comparatives.org/