An Introduction to Virus Scanners
Umakant Mishra · 2010
The main functions of an anti-virus program are, (i) Virus prevention and file protection, (ii) Virus scanning and detection, (iii) Removing virus from infected files, and (iv) Recovering damaged files and objects. An anti-virus program employs various methods to detect and remove viruses. The two popular methods of detecting viruses are signature scanning and behavior monitoring. However each of these methods has its strengths and weaknesses. As the detection gets more sophisticated so are the virus programmers. The virus programmers also try to go one step beyond the anti-virus mechanism and create intelligent viruses which pose more and more difficult challenges before the anti-virus producers.