The history of the anti-virus programs or software is presented here.
In 1988, the viruses have captured the media attention, and some of the best anti-virus researchers of today worked in this business before 1989. Thus, 1988 was the year in which anti-virus vendors started to appear, which caused a great stir around what, at that time, was only a potential problem. They were small traders, who sold software at discounted prices (often 5 USD or 10 USD), some programs were shareware, some freeware. Some companies have tried occasionally to propel themselves, but no one was paying serious money for a potential problem.
So viruses like Stoned, Cascade and Jerusalem had chances to spread without being discovered and to achieve a number of infected objects so big that this ensured their further existence.
In December 1990, there appeared a product that will give a new direction for the anti-virus industry: Norton AntiVirus. In 1995 over 50% of infections were caused by boot sector viruses, now 85% are macro viruses. Polymorphic macro viruses multiply. They are a much bigger problem than the stealth viruses, because stealth is headed to the checkers in the system and polymorphism to the scanners, which are most commonly used tools. And each polymorphic virus is a source of false alarms and will result in a greater work than that submitted by researchers for other viruses.
Note the emergence of virus e-mails and Internet worms. As more and more viruses appear, their results will be increasingly higher, as well as the databases used by them, thus filling the database will take longer and will require more memory. The effort to keep the scanners “to date” will be very high, so some manufacturers will either give the companies a free anti-virus software or a very cheap one, focusing on checkers, or the companies must do their own research.
Also, anti-virus products will only survive with a friendly interface for users, a small execution time and an intuitive use. The recommended prevention measures include:
Install a good anti-virus software.
Do not open attachments to e-mail message whose author is unknown.
Make data backup. Periodically save data on CDs.
Scan the downloaded applications from the Internet.
Set up your firewall.
The recommended treatment measures include: boot only from a CD (disk) which is clean, meaning that is has no viruses; run the anti-virus on a regular basis and delete the infected files; rescan the infected disk (to exclude multiple infections); perform any resettlement for your applications; rescan the whole system.
If you’re a beginner and you do not understand anything of what was said above, you should know that a virus stops applications, writes error messages, so if you see those things on your computer, remember to call a friend who knows, and will cost you a beer to help you, or, if you don’t have a friend good at computers, address to a specialist. Make sure to address him while you have still time to repair the damage, otherwise this will cost you the “nice” words from all of your friends, who might have been infected by your computer also, thanks to this online environment in which we are living these days.
