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Virus Signatures - Monthly Updates Not Good Enough
This article is about updating your virus scanners. If you are in charge of maintaining your own
machine, read this now. If you have a system administrator in charge of maintaining your machine,
then I urge you to give a copy of this article to your system administrator.
That being said, I will continue.
Folks, things have gotten a lot crazier when it comes to updating your virus scanners. For those not
"in the know," when you update your virus scanners, you update one or two (or both) of these things:
* the code used to determine whether or not viruses exist
* signatures, or snippets of code or data that virus scanners use to help detect the presence of
viruses. Virus scanners with greater amounts of signatures can detect greater amounts of viruses.
You have to update your virus scanner because new viruses come out all of the time. Your virus
scanner that you installed in 1997, chances are, will have no clue about viruses released last
year, much less last month. If you have an old or non-updated virus scanner, you may think that
you are protected, but it is just like closing the doors to your house but keeping the doors
unlocked. There is a facade of safety that will be revealed if a virus attacks your seemingly safe PC.
How do you update your virus scanners? Check your scanner's website or contact their technical support.
Better yet, many scanners, such as
Norton's AntiVirus come with a feature called "LiveUpdate" that
grabs and installs new scanner updates over the Internet.
Are you using a PC at work? Many companies have virus-updating policies. They make sure that their
signatures are updated on a frequent basis. This is good, but, unfortunately, most businesses like
these update their signatures once a month. This used to be acceptable, but I believe this practice
cannot continue any more.
Click here to continue to page 2.
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