Big, Fat Anti-Malware

Have you noticed that your virus scans are eating up your resources from time to time? Welcome to the club.

When one of my computers is running its scan - and because I have the "freeware" version, it runs the scan at the most inopportune time! - it bogs down and becomes almost unusable.

I recently read an article than explains this, so I wanted to share that with you.

Basically, the problem has to do with three things: the age of the code in most anti-malware software, the number of threats that are out there, and the fact that products must now support a host of OS's.

Anti-malware software (anti-virus, trojan detection software, etc.) has been around almost as long as the Internet. Amazing how fast the Black Hats get ideas! If only they were on the White Hat side! Nevertheless, it was very shortly after we began using the Internet heavily that malware made its appearance, and anti-malware became available. Which is to say, some of these products are very old. For example, I use AVG, and have done for... I hate to admit this, but probably 15 years.

Over time, malware became more and more sophisticated. Virus profile updates were essential. In the old days, most malware protection software operated by scanning for what is called a signature, or definition. This was basically a file that was added to the kernel of your OS. The malware detection software looked at all your files to find any evidence of one of these signature files, and then it was isolated or destroyed.

But as I said, Black Hats are smart. So soon they were writing malware that had no readily available signature file. So White Hats had to find other ways of detecting the bad stuff. Enter heuristics, behavioral analysis and emulation. All three of these are essentially variations on a theme. What they do is look for dangerous behavior of a file or bit of code. They might say, oh, a file has been added to the kernel, and malware adds files to the kernel, this is dangerous behavior. (Of course, anti-malware software adds files to the kernel!)

Another problem is that because no one anti-malware software product is the best-in-class in every type of malware detection and destruction, many of us are running multiple products, all of which can interfere with one another, and slow our computers down even further.

Yet another complaint many people have - and I have run into this one, too, with my email at work - is something known as "real-time scanning." This is an algorithm in which each time the user tries to access a file, a malware scan is run on that file to be sure it's not infected. This can slow down your file access enormously.

What to do? There is no perfect solution, but you can opt for the products that come with the highest satisfaction ratings for both protection and performance. According to PC Magazine, a reliable source, in my book, here are the best freeware versions available today:

Ad-Aware 8.2
Avast 2.0
AVG 9.0
Malwarebytes 1.26
Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0

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