Why there is no silver bullet for computer virus?
By ketanm
@ketanm (68)
India
March 13, 2013 11:18am CST
I saw today that anti-virus program on my laptop is consuming so many resources and sometimes it slows down the laptop and hamper my productivity. Also as I read, the number of new viruses keep on increasing and now-a-days even smartphones are prone to viruses. So I was wondering is it possible that anti-virus companies themselves promote virus creation? Why there is no silver bullet for viruses?
1 person likes this
7 responses
@usemyname (640)
• Philippines
13 Mar 13
As fellow linux user, I couldn't agree more with, topffer. All this time that I've been using the linux OS, no virus ever contaminated my computer. Cheers!![](/Content/images/emotes/thumbup.gif)
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@owlwings (43914)
• Cambridge, England
13 Mar 13
Antivirus companies do NOT promote viruses. They have quite enough work to do researching and combating the new viruses and variants which are created every day.
F-Secure claim that they log about 25,000 malware samples every day! Of course, many of these will be variants of ones already known and include viruses, trojans, spyware code and many other things. All of these samples have to be evaluated and checked against the database to make sure that the antivirus product successfully protects the customer.
There is no 'silver bullet' simply because virus coders are always creating new exploits and code to try to make their viruses invisible and because there are so many different viruses working in thousands of different ways.
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@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
13 Mar 13
I have heard the suggestion of anti virus companies producing viruses in order to generate business, but there is no truth in such rumours. Anti virus protection is essential due to the amount of viruses already in circulation, so creating more would not benefit them in any way.
As for the proverbial silver bullet, this is definitely not possible because new viruses are constantly appearing. Anyone creating a virus is not likely to create one that is susceptible to current anti virus protection and the anti virus companies cannot protect against the unknown. As a result anti virus companies can only respond to new threats as they appear, which is why such programs update regularly via the internet as new definitions are released.
The only certain protection is to create a complete disk backup of the operating system and programs while in a stable condition, which can then be used to overwrite the drive in case of serious problems.
@natliegleb (5175)
• India
13 Mar 13
it is just a matter of time before they start adding more proof and make it even more smarter
@profmuhammadakhtar (103)
• Pakistan
14 Mar 13
In general computer virus are generated by those companies who are aware of the fact that by using these experties people face trouble .Secondly these antivirus makes in simplest form and with cheap resource.
@blackrusty (3519)
• Mexico
13 Mar 13
avasti is a great one to have and it is free it runs in the back ground and it up dates all the time it block every thing I have never had any issues with it ever
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