Warning: most
antivirus programs will not protect you against all
forms of malignant software (often called "malware")
on their own. Find out how to protect yourself.
Sure, your antivirus software will protect you against
viruses. It will probably even do a good job against
worms. But what Trojans, exploits, backdoors,
spyware and the dozen other nasty software parasites?
Malware and Antivirus Software: a History
The war on computer viruses has led to an arms race
between the designers of antivirus software and the
designers of viruses (you didn't think viruses just
created themselves did you?). Some years ago,
virus designers responded to ever more successful antivirus
software by creating the descendents of viruses, worms,
which did not infect files but rather installed themselves
directly on the hard drive, making them harder to detect.
The arms race has since led to a total of at least eleven
distinct types of what is now called malware, a neologism
meaning bad (as in malignant rather than shoddy) software.
According to Wikipedia, these eleven types of malware
are:
1. Virus
2. Worm
3. Wabbit
4. Trojan
5. Backdoor
6. Spyware
7. Exploit
8. Rootkit
9. Key Logger
10. Dialer
11. URL injection
There's a twelfth kind of malware: adware, which Wikipedia
considers simply to be a subset of spyware.
Why Antivirus Software Isn't Enough for Malware
As you can see, makers of antivirus software have their
work cut out for them if they're going to keep every
instance of malware off your system. As a result,
antivirus software makers have often had to pick their
battles. Adware, whose makers often claim they
are doing nothing illegal or even questionable, often
gets treated more lightly.
Even when antivirus software makers do come out with
a product that fights all twelve or so kinds of malware,
responding to each new instance of malware to come on
the market isn't easy. First the malware has to
be identified, which means someone's computer, and probably
tens of thousands of computers, will be infected first.
Then, the malware has to be dissected. Then a
removal program and a filter must both be written.
Then the removal program and filter must be tested to
make sure they work, and that they don't interfere with
any other functions of the antivirus software or the
computer itself. When a fix for the virus is out,
it then has to be loaded into an antivirus software
update and transmitted to every single computer worldwide
that has the antivirus software installed.
The speed with which antivirus software makers are able
to deliver updates for newly discovered malware would
impress even Santa Claus. Yet there's still a
crucial window of one to a few days between when the
new malware has reached a critical mass of thousands
of computers, and when the update is released.
If your antivirus software is not set to check for updates
automatically every hour or so, that window opens even
wider.
Practically speaking, then, you're better off having
more than one line of defense against malware.
Even if two different anti-malware programs utilize
the exact same database, there might be a crucial difference
in the speed of getting updates. It makes sense
to back up your antivirus software with anti-spyware
software. When you consider that dedicated anti-spyware
software developers make protection against the non-virus
forms of malware their stock-in-trade, you can see why
anti-spyware software is so essential. In fact,
you should strongly consider having two anti-spyware
programs running on your computer at all times, since
the gap in updates between two anti-spyware programs
can be even longer than for two antivirus programs.
After all, with a dozen kinds of malware out there,
shouldn't you at least have two pieces of software to
fight them?
About
the author: Joel Walsh writes for http://www.spyware-refuge.com/ on
how to remove spyware: http://www.spyware-refuge.com/?%20spyware%20adware%20blocker |
