ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE Meaning, History, Importance and Functions

 

ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE

Meaning, History, Importance and Functions

Meaning: What is an antivirus?

It is a program that was born from the need to respond to the threat of digital viruses, capable of infecting computers to cause problems of various kinds, taking advantage of errors or security holes, mainly on the surface of the operating system. The heyday of the attacks was clearly in the origins of the Windows system, present in the vast majority of homes, which continually warned of failures and made available urgent updates that the common user ignored or simply did not accompany.

Anti- comes from Latin, to refer to the idea of ​​being in opposition, and virus has its etymological origin in Latin as poison, which enters and attacks the organism, keeping similarities with respect to this technological perspective where the victim moves to a device that may become inoperable due to an infection within the installed software. Viruses affect the software that provides commands to the hardware (monitor, mouse, keyboard and processor).

Are there viruses on mobile? Today's days are governed by smartphones, with a relegated PC, and fortunately a very high level of security has been achieved on these devices. Although viruses exist, their scope and spread are limited, and generally the problem arises as a consequence of an app that one installs. Both smartphones with Android and iOS operating systems have specific functions to protect us, however, as a precaution; one can install an Antivirus Software, mainly if it gives us greater confidence.

History and Importance

Although it may seem strange, Antivirus were not exactly born on a par with computer viruses, but a few years later.

Computer viruses are based on the concept of a self-reproducing program, coined in 1949 by the American scientist of Hungarian origin John von Neumann, and it is considered that the first virus as such was Creeper, from 1971. To counteract this virus, Ray S. Tomlinson (famous for having created the email) programmed The Reaper, which could be considered the first antivirus in history, since it eliminated the Creeper, but the Reaper itself was a self-reproducing program, which included it more in the category of virus than antivirus.

So, while it is mentioned with that possibility, The Reaper is not generally considered the first antivirus in history. In the early 1980s, the microcomputer industry was in full swing, with dozens of models of eight-bit computers, and the first PCs and clones on the scene. The first viruses attack several of these platforms, but thanks to their compatibility, PCs are beginning to be the most affected.

These first pathogens are practically harmless if we compare them with those of today: they reproduce and show a message on the screen (as political-social demands), but there are also those that destroy information. The first virus that was transmitted outside of testing laboratories or controlled environments was the Elk Cloner for Apple created in 1981. In 1986, the first PC virus, BRAIN, emerged.

The honor of being the first person to eliminate a virus from a computer belongs to Bernard Fix, who "cleaned" the Vienna virus, although it seems that he did it more with artisanal techniques than with the software he created for it, and that he only did a part of the job. The majority current of opinion about who created the first antivirus software as we know it today opts for G Data, a German company that created such a solution for the Atari ST platform.

Also in 1987, John McAfee founded the company that would bear his surname in the United States, launching at the end of the year Virus Scan, his first product of this type, and coinciding in the year with the Czechoslovaks (the country still existed before splitting into Slovakia and Czech Republic) from NOD. The main companies in the IT security sector that we have today emerged in the period from the end of the eighties to the end of the nineties: F-PROT in 1989, Panda Software (later Panda Security) in 1990, Symantec / Norton in 1991 as well as AVG, Bitdefender in 1996, and Kaspersky in 1997.

From antivirus to antimalware

The revolution caused by the Internet and connectivity, the popularization of new technologies and the omnipresence of computers first and smartphones later, provoked the evolution of the creation of viruses, diversifying them, making them more harmful, and finding new ways to attack them. users.

At the same time, virus programming - and now I will go on to talk about malware in more generic terms - lost its "innocence", and from producing pathogens that did little more than reproduce and display messages on the screen, programmers went on to build real weapons or spies that could submit computer data, or gain privileged user information, such as bank account data to perpetrate theft.

From antivirus, then, we move on to antimalware, a more general tool that prevents the infection of what are properly viruses, as well as that we fall into tricks such as cyber scams by email.

Antivirus functions

In the early days, Antiviruses were used to scan files and disks explicitly, but they did not have resident modules that were always in charge of ensuring the security of the system, something that did not become general until the 90s.

The resident engine, something essential today for any good antimalware worth its salt, constantly monitors what is running on the system, preventing harmful actions from being carried out. Although the code of the first viruses was "static", so they could be recognized by their digital signatures, as they progress more sophisticated techniques are required to identify them.

This is where artificial intelligence comes into play, which allows us to identify pathogens by their behavior. Initially crude, it is enhanced by the appearance of the cloud, which many antimalware use as a complement to the detection and elimination arsenal that they have installed locally.