How Does a Virus Scanner Work?
Malware The computer virus is probably the most widely recognized form of malicious software, or malware. Like a biological virus, it requires a host for its survival. Once embedded into a larger program, the virus will alter the performance of the application, potentially replicating itself wildly. But viruses are not the major threat to computers in the Internet age. More prevalent today are worms, which are discrete programs that don’t need a host program to reproduce themselves, and cause all sorts of trouble. Whereas viruses can usually be quarantined to a specific computer or program, a worm notoriously uses the network connections of one computer to generate copies of itself in as many other computers as possible. Other forms of malware include Trojans, which are superficially benign programs that secretly perform some malicious function; and rootkits, which can secretly hijack the operating system of a computer without the user’s knowledge. Scanning Methods New viruses and othe
