What techniques antivirus programs use to find viruses?
There are generally two different virus detection methods which antivirus programs use to detect viruses-signature (also known as string) scanning and heuristic scanning.String scanning is mostly used for detecting known viruses.A signature of specific virus if a little database of uniquely identifiable “fingerprints” that it contains.Antivirus programs look for such “fingerprints” to find files infected by it.Virus signatures are classified by the type of infection they represent because it will take too much time if a scanner looks for all known viruses in every different type of file.Antivirus programs use other different tricks to make scanning faster but these tricks are only known to their manufacturers. Sometimes antivirus researchers find common areas that viruses in a virus family share uniquely and create a generic signature to detect them.This helps scanners detect even new viruses from this family.However,string scanning requires exact matches between signature and infectio
