Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Choosing the right anti-virus – why it is more imperative today than ever

Not long back an anti-virus package in your PC must not have found its way into your must-have list before you purchase your PC but with so many attacks and threats today with large scale annihilation and reaching epidemic proportions within seconds of a vulnerability exposure

This domino effect has made an average user today to sit up and take suitable steps to protect and use a rock-hard anti-virus package updated regularly.

A typical attack will generally use system vulnerabilities to bypass the user and launch code automatically, dramatically reducing the 'lead time' between the appearance of a new threat and it reaching widespread magnitude. There's absolutely no question that today's threats are faster and frequent than ever before. Where it used to take weeks, or even months, for a virus to achieve widespread circulation, today's threats can achieve worldwide distribution in hours - riding on the back of email, P2P clients,

The number of new threats continues to grow steadily, with several hundred new threats appearing every day. As outlined above, many of today's threats are a composite 'bundle' containing different types of threat. Malicious code writers have at their disposal a wide-ranging malware 'menu'. Alongside the 'traditional' threat from viruses, there are now email and Internet worms, Trojans and various other types of threat. Often a virus or worm will drop a Trojan backdoor onto the infected system. This allows remote control of the machine by the author of the virus or worm, or by whoever has 'leased' the Trojan from them for spam propagation or other malicious purposes. Or the code may include a Trojan downloader, specifically designed to pull down malicious code from a remote site - perhaps an update to the virus or worm. Then again, it may include a Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack, designed to bring down a particular web site.

Anti-virus products have become increasingly sophisticated over the years, to deal with the growing complexity of viruses, worms Trojans and other malicious code. This includes proactive detection mechanisms designed to find new, unknown threats even before they first appear in the field. Nevertheless, regular updating of anti-virus protection is more important than ever before, given the speed at which today's threats are able to spread. That's why anti-virus vendors have sought to reduce the time interval between virus definition updates, from quarterly, to monthly, to weekly and finally to daily updates. And Kaspersky Lab now provides updated virus definition files every hour on the hour.

Read some of the product reviews below to help decide an appropriate anti-virus solution for you.

About.com ~ zdnet ~ Securityfocus ~ pcmag ~ pcworld ~ consumer search ~ CNET-Reviews ~ VirusList.com - Review ~ Reviews. net ~ ~Anti-virus-software-review~

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