Why do I still get viruses even though I run anti-virus?
By Leo Notenboom
In this excerpt from Answercast #89, I look at why anti-virus software always lags behind the malware designers and how you can keep yourself safe on the internet.
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Can’t prevent viruses?
Well, ultimately, you can!
So… There are a couple of different issues that I want to talk about with this question.
One is that there is no single anti-virus or anti-malware product that will absolutely catch every single virus or Trojan or other form of malware that’s out there. There just isn’t.
I have an article on that: “I run anti-virus software. Why do I sometimes still get infected?”
The virus race
The bottom line is that it’s ultimately a race. It’s a race between the different kinds of anti-malware technologies and the people who write malware. They come up with new techniques; new things to exploit and they push their viruses and malware out quickly, more quickly than software like anti-malware tools can be updated.
Imagine… it takes a little bit of time for something as complicated as an anti-malware tool to actually respond to tricky techniques with the complicated algorithms that they need to use to detect viruses – without detecting false positives.
So it’s a race. Malware is being created every day and anti-malware software is being updated. But it always (almost by definition) lags behind by some amount of time – during which you and I, and everyone else, are vulnerable to these new and increasingly more destructive pieces of malware.
Read the rest of the story here..
This post is excerpted with permission from Leo Notenboom.
