Antivirus Software Protects Against Hidden Code

Even though viruses are a well known and common thing these days, many people still neglect to install antivirus software on their personal computers. It’s really a shame too, because the small cost and ease of installing this necessary protection can save you hours of hassle and the possibility of losing years of treasured data. If you think you’ll never ever get a virus you may want to think again. No one is completely safe from infection and the people who create and distribute the viruses get smarter about it each year, finding new ways to hide them so that unsuspecting people are effected.

Good antivirus programs are typically updated at least daily, so that the software is able to recognize even the newest malicious code out there. And while many well known brands of anti virus software are commercial, there are also some very good free options out there, although typically you will need to have a better understanding of computer systems if you want to use these free versions. The prompts can sometimes be confusing to inexperienced users and in this case wrong decisions can be made, leading to unwanted infections.

Many of the antivirus solutions are signature based in that they look for known malicious code to detect viruses. This has the drawback of not being able to identify new and unrecognized virus. To combat this problem, some solutions use heuristics, which looks for common patterns or attributes to determine if new code is benign or malicious. Using some combination of both can be the most effective solution and provide the best protection with the least impact on your systems performance.

While it is necessary to protect your computer with some form of antivirus software, you should be aware that there can be drawbacks to this protection. Generally when the software detects a potential problem it will alert the user with a prompt and ask what action should be taken. In the case of inexperienced users this prompt may be confusing and they could unknowingly create a security hole or delete necessary files. Because of the way viruses are scanned for it is possible that the software will not allow some safe programs to work properly on your computer without making changes to the anti virus configuration. Real time software that depends on network connectivity to check for updates can cause issues, but even well known internet browsers and operating systems have been known to have incompatibilities with various antivirus platforms when first released.

Perhaps the most noticeable drawback of antivirus protection is its effect on system performance. In some cases your PC will run noticeably slower with antivirus protection turned on. It’s no wonder considering that the software has to analyze every single byte of data coming through your computer, but if speed is your thing it can be truly annoying if not downright frustrating. Some solutions are better than others and by doing your research, which you should be doing anyway, you can find a good balance between protection and system performance.

While it may be possible for some people to run their computers without the protection offered by antivirus software, most people need it to protect them against increasingly well hidden malicious code.