It’s essential to understand how your antivirus software recognizes threats. Cyber-terrorists continue to develop more dangerous viruses and malware that can infiltrate computers, take information, corrupt documents, and cause damage to other things. The majority of antivirus software is designed to identify and eliminate dangerous threats before they cause harm. They do this by analyzing your personal data, system files and computer programs.
Traditionally, antivirus programs use signature-based detection to evaluate documents that come into your devices against an existing database of known signatures of viruses. This method looks for the fingerprints of the virus, then locates the corresponding file or program, and warns you if there is a match. It is a good method, but hackers continue to create new and diverse types malware. To recognize them antivirus software must keep their definition files up-to-date with the latest viruses.
Another method employed by hackers to bypass antivirus scanners is to use encryption to protect the malware payload. Once a virus has been encoded, it is able to bypass scanners and signatures since it’s not executable. This is usually done by does webroot protect against malware attaching a tiny header to the virus. This allows it to jump the counter and execute the virus on the first opportunity.
Antivirus software employs different methods to search for viruses such as heuristic-based detection as well as behavior-based detection. Heuristic-based analysis is similar in concept to signature detection, in that it searches for patterns and trends in the behavior of a program. With a trial and error approach the heuristic detection method can detect viruses that aren’t identified by signature-based methods.