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How Anti-Virus Programs Protects A Computer

Maintaining Your Computer And System Integrity

Owning a computer comes with responsibilities like registry maintenance, disk cleanup, and scanning for computer viruses. Using Anti-Virus Software aids in the identification and elimination of malware which is malicious software designed to cause damage to a computer's system.

Malware includes such computer contaminants as viruses, worms, Trojans, rootkits, spyware, adware, crimeware, and any other unwanted malicious software. These unwanted software programs can cause limited computer and software function and even complete hard drive failure. These malicious programs are installed without the consent of the user by using tricks to getting into a computer's backdoor.

Common Problems with Spyware

Spyware was created and is used to track a computer user's activities. It is much more advanced that mere computer monitoring. Programs that contain spyware can collect personal information from the user's computer, redirect web browser activities, track surfing habits, and even install additional software without permission from the user.

Spyware can change computer settings, cause problems with computer functions, decrease connection speed, cause frequent changes in home pages, and reduce the ability to use certain applications. Many times a spyware program can defeat its own purpose due to the nature of the program.

To protect your computer from such attacks you need to have Anti-Virus Software program installed to scan and remove this harmful software.

How Anti-Virus Software Programs Work to Remove Spyware

Anti-Virus Software programs use various methods to detect spyware and other malicious software on your computer. The most common method of identification an anti-virus program uses is the signature based detection method.

This method will detect only known virus threats when scanning the computer's file contents against the virus signature dictionary. Once the malicious code is found it is either:

Quarantined - Quarantined files are inaccessible and render a file with malicious code unusable. Encrypting the offending file is the most common way to quarantine a virus.

Repaired - In some cases the user would rather save the content of the infected file so it is repaired (by choice) by removing the malicious code from the file. When an infected file is beyond repair this process will fail to complete the repair.

Removed - When a file is the actual virus it is completely removed from the system.

Other methods of detecting malicious software are suspicious behavior monitoring and heuristics. Suspicious behavior monitoring is a method that monitors all program activity for any suspicious behavior and flags the activity. The heuristics method can sometimes cause false alarms but is useful in finding malicious software through file emulation and file analysis.

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