Jasper07 said:
FAST6191 said:
CanadaX21 said:
Microsoft Security Essentials for my antivirus
Jasper07 said:
Mine isn't even listed
I use Malwarebyte's anti-malware, it's free and detects all the virusus.
You do know that there's a difference between anti-malware and anti-virus, right?
For the purposes of this discussion (that is to say not defining something for a dictionary) I thought we stopped making that distinction about 5 years ago if not longer?
... so there isn't a difference? If so what is it?
Traditionally you had viruses which were unwanted programs that spread by themselves (various methods from abusing autoplay to actual exploits) and trojans which were unwanted programs that you needed to run yourself (no self propagation).
Along the way spyware (website monitors, application usage monitoring....) and other malware (ad bars, dialers and what have you) appeared/grew in number and were equally troublesome to end users.
I will also mention firewalls (network connection and network application/protocol monitoring) and backup as it might become important in a moment.
For the longest time and in some cases it still happens the anti virus makers ignored the second category and focused solely on viruses and trojans with maybe a bit of heuristics (automated detection) and protection (something tries to change some important settings and it says oi) in general. Also they tried to clean things up if you managed to get infected although in many ways these were simpler times. This meant people needed multiple programs to detect viruses and trojans, others to detect spyware/malware and others for firewalls and backup.
Because of this omission the AV companies were getting laughed at by security professionals for incompetence/being money grabbing parasites (although they still are being laughed at now but for slightly different reasons-
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/5167328 sums it up in the last few minutes pretty well but if you can watch the whole thing) so they eventually added the second category as well as maybe grew a firewall and backup abilities although the latter two are a different conversation. Along the way some of the malware scanners added some virus detection if they did not already have it (viruses and trojans are still malware) and maybe heuristics (however many are still tools you run to detect and clean up things rather than programs you have running all the time though although this gets blurred again when you have the standalone scanning options of some of these programs than can be triggered upon downloading a new file/email). They might have tried to call themselves something different as well "internet security", "security suite", "security solution"... but the term antivirus is fairly engrained so it lost some of the original meaning.
This blurred the lines and meant people might not have needed multiple scanners any more. At the same time the way malware worked changed dramatically as well with virus kits becoming standard, polymorphic code and related concepts/concepts with similar effects becoming fairly standard, traditional signature detection becoming far harder thanks to the efforts of malware writers, differences in intentions- 90's malware might have just popped up a screen saying you got yourself infected or simply tried to mess your machine up where now it will try to stay cloaked (and keep your machine infected) and use your machine as a zombie to do whatever and more. This is also what gave many anti virus programs a serious, if not terminal, case of the bloat and related to the previous lines in this paragraph reduced their effectiveness to the point where people say AV programs are but part of the solution to the security problem.
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K3Nv2:
