How Antivirus detect Viruses

Many of us are aware of antivirus . All of us know that antivirus is used to detect viruses. But many of dont know how antivirus detects viruses.

So i thought of educating people about it.

There are 5 techniques in which an antivirus detects viruses

1. Signature Based Scan
2. Heuristic Based Scan
3. Threat Sense Technology
4. Proactive Defense
5. Artificial Intelligence

Signature Based Scan

Maximum of antivirus programs search the antivirus by signature scan. In signature based scanning anti virus program searches within given files for the presence of certain strings (also only in certain regions).If these predefined strings are found, then antivirus report A Threat has been detected.

Heuristic Based Scan

The first heuristic engines were introduced to detect DOS viruses in 1989.Heuristic (hyu-ˈris-tik) is an adjective for methods that help in problem solving. A heuristic scan is used to detect new, unknown viruses in your systems that have not yet been identified. Only some anti viruses can do this type of scan, the majority are only able to detect known viruses.

In this scanning, anti virus program searches instructions or commands within a file that are not found in typical good application programs. As a result, a heuristic engine is able to detect potentially malicious files and report them as a virus.

Threat Sense Technology

In this technology , when a certain files does malicious activity in computer. Next, when you update your anti virus these files are send to security experts of that anti virus that you are using. They analyze the file, if it is a virus then they make it's signatures

Proactive Defense

One more technology is "Proactive Defense". It was first used by Kaspersky .When a program or process gets executed, "Proactive Defense" tells the user about the activity of the program and asks it to allow or Block. The Most advanced Proactive Defense is provided by Comodo Internet Security.

Artificial Intelligence

These programs monitor you computer activities. If any dangerous or specious activity occurred by a file, they inform user and give some option to perform certain action. Now user has to take decision that is it a virus file or helpful file. Some times, if user takes wrong decision then the software which is reported by anti virus get corrupted and antivirus quarantined.

Any doubts please comment below