Anti‐virus software methods have changed little over the years:
Anti‐Virus and adware etc
- Malicious software is created (by some estimates, at an astonishing rate of 158 every minute of every day)
- Lots of machines get infected
- The anti‐virus companies find out about it
- The anti‐virus companies build a fix for it and update what’s called their signature file
- At some point later you update your anti‐virus software and you are protected.
We use software called Webroot that uses a different methodology. They have some 25 million PCs protected around the world that report into a threat centre. The threat centre also uses multiple tricks to attract virus infections. Using these multiple sources of information it knows about the current virus threat much more quickly that the traditional method and so the end points (your and my PCs) are protected quicker.
It also understands behaviour patterns on your machine so if you’re one of the unlucky ones to be hit by some malicious software that Webroot doesn’t yet know about, and it tries to change anything on your machine, then webroot will know this is out of the ordinary and quarantine the file. This is a much more proactive method of protecting your machines than the traditional signature based method.
It is also much more lightweight than other anti‐virus tools meaning it doesn’t use so much of your PC’s resources to run.
Once we have brought you under the Webroot umbrella, we will also be made aware of any issues on your machine prior to you probably even knowing about the issue, enabling us to help you out before things get worse.