Introduction to Antivirus

Traditional AV software looks for malware with predefined malicious patterns or signatures. Malware is harmful software whose primary goal is to cause damage to a target machine, including but not limited to:

    Gain full access to a target machine.
    Steal sensitive information such as passwords.
    Encrypt files and cause damage to files.
    Inject other malicious software or unwanted advertisements.
    Used the compromised machine to perform further attacks such as botnet attacks.

Generally speaking, AV detection can be classified into three main approaches:

    Static Detection
    Dynamic Detection
    Heuristic and Behavioral Detection