AV Product Guidelines....
AV Product Use Guidelines
"First, understand how your anti-virus product works. Then, start with a known-clean computer and follow specific step to assure good virus detection/protection. Do research on specific products before purchase."
Most modern anti-virus products use a combination of techniques. However, they still get almost all of their protection from their scanner component. It's vital to understand exactly how your product works so that you understand what type of protection you really have. Here are some rules that will help you to make sure that you get maximum protection out of whatever product you have:
- First, you should check your computer's setup information to make certian that the boot sequence starts with the floppy drive. If you don't, and it starts with the hard drive then any boot sector virus on your computer will gain control before you run the anti-virus program(s). To get to the BIOS setup you will typical have to press a key or keystroke combination during the time the BIOS is checking the computer's memory. Once in setup you can check the boot sequence
- Be sure to cold boot your PC from a write-protected diskette before virus checking, particurlarly if your suspect you have a virus. Most anti-virus products make this recommendation, but this rarely gets done because the recommendation is often buried in some obscure location in the documentation. If your PC's memory is infected with a virus that your scanner does not recognize, you could infect all the programs on your disk if you do not boot from a clean disk. Don't take this chance; boot from a write-protected diskette before you scan.
- If you are using a product which depends mostly on its scanner component, make sure that you always have the latest version. Scanners are often frequently updated.
- Before you execute or install any new software, check it first. If it comes with an install program. check again after you install the software; an install program will frequently change or decompress executable programs. After you first check of your system to make sure everything is as it should be.
- If your product contains a scanner component, check all diskettes brought in from another location; even data diskettes! Inevitably someone will leave a data diskette in their A: drive, potentially spreading a boot sector virus if the diskette is infected.
- If the anti-virus software has a component that installs under Windows in order to scan all files before they are opened by all means install that component. This is a valueable service that is well worth the small amount of slowdown and resource use you will experience.
What's the best anti-virus product?
The simple answer is that there is no definite answer to the question! For one thing, a "good" anti-virus product integrates well with your particular system and system setup. If you are on a network with diskless workstations, for example, you might want to install the anti-virus software on the server. If you don't regularly exchange or download files you might find a less instusive anti-virus product more to your liking. And so on.
Relying on magazine articles is also not the best way to decide upon an anti-virus product. Valid testing requires special setups to make certain products are being tested against real viruses under conditions those viruses might be found.
One measure of antivirus software is ICSA approval. To obtain this approval a scanner must detect all viruses on the full NCSA test suite. You can obtain more information about this at:
http://www.icsa.net/sevices/product_cert/
If you want to try an anti-virus product, many producers have evaluation versions at their web site.
