What's in a name? When it comes to viruses it's a matter of identification to the general public. An anti-virus program does not really need the name of a virus as it identifies it by its characteristics. But, while giving a virus a name helps the public at large it also serves to confuse them since the names given to a particular beast can differ from anti-virus maker to anti-virus maker.

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Viruses come into various anti-virus companies around the world at various times and by various means. Each company analyzes the virus and assigns a name to it for tracking purposes. While there is cooperation between companies when new viruses are identified, that cooperation often takes a back seat to getting a product update out the door so the anti-virus company's customers are protected. This delay allows alternate names to enter the market. Over time these are often standardized or, at least, cross-referenced in listings; but that does not help when the beast makes its first appearance.

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devarajan

Number of Viruses:

There are more MS-DOS/Windows viruses than all other types of viruses combined (by a large margin). Estimates of exactly how many there are vary widely and the number is constantly growing.

In 1990, estimates ranged from 200 to 500; then in 1991 estimates ranged from 600 to 1,000 different viruses. In late 1992, estimates were ranging from 1,000 to 2,300 viruses. In mid-1994, the numbers vary from 4,500 to over 7,500 viruses. In 1996 the number climbed over 10,000. 1998 saw 20,000 and 2000 topped 50,000. It's easy to say there are more now.

The confusion exists partly because it's difficult to agree on how to count viruses. New viruses frequently arise from someone taking an existing virus that does something like put a message out on your screen saying: "Your PC is now stoned" and changing it to say something like "Donald Duck is a lie!". Is this a new virus? Most experts say yes. But, this is a trivial change that can be done in less than two minutes resulting in yet another "new" virus.

Another problem comes from viruses that try to conceal themselves from scanners by mutating. In other words, every time the virus infects another file, it will try to use a different version of itself. These viruses are known as polymorphic viruses.

One example, the Whale (a huge clumsy 10,000 byte virus), creates 33 different versions of itself when it infects files. At least one person counts this as 33 different viruses on their list. Many of the large number of viruses known to exist have not been detected in the wild but probably exist only in someone's virus collection.

David M. Chess of IBM's High Integrity Computing Laboratory reported in the November 1991 Virus Bulletin that "about 30 different viruses and variants account for nearly all of the actual infections that we see in day-to-day operation." Now, about 180 different viruses (and some of these are members of a single family) account for all the viruses that actually spread in the wild. To keep track visit the Wildlist, a list which reports virus sightings.

How can there be so few viruses active when some experts report such high numbers? This is probably because most viruses are poorly written and cannot spread at all or cannot spread without betraying their presence. Although the actual number of viruses will probably continue to be hotly debated, what is clear is that the total number of viruses is increasing, although the active viruses not quite as rapidly as the numbers might suggest.

Summary:
By number, there are well over 100,000 known computer viruses.
Only a small percentage of this total number account for those viruses found in the wild, however. Most exist only in collections.

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devarajan

Virus Behavior:

Viruses come in a great many different forms, but they all potentially have two phases to their execution, the infection phase and the attack phase:

Infection Phase:
When the virus executes it has the potential to infect other programs. What's often not clearly understood is precisely when it will infect the other programs. Some viruses infect other programs each time they are executed; other viruses infect only upon a certain trigger. This trigger could be anything; a day or time, an external event on your PC, a counter within the virus, etc. Virus writers want their programs to spread as far as possible before anyone notices them.

It is a serious mistake to execute a program a few times - find nothing infected and presume there are no viruses in the program. You can never be sure the virus simply hasn't yet triggered its infection phase.

Many viruses go resident in the memory of your PC in the same or similar way as terminate and stay resident (TSR) programs. (For those not old enough to remember TSRs, they were programs that executed under DOS but stayed in memory instead of ending.) This means the virus can wait for some external event before it infects additional programs. The virus may silently lurk in memory waiting for you to access a diskette, copy a file, or execute a program, before it infects anything. This makes viruses more difficult to analyze since it's hard to guess what trigger condition they use for their infection.

On older systems, standard (640K) memory is not the only memory vulnerable to viruses. It is possible to construct a virus which will locate itself in upper memory (the space between 640K and 1M) or in the High Memory Area (the small space between 1024K and 1088K). And, under Windows, a virus can effectively reside in any part of memory.

Resident viruses frequently take over portions of the system software on the PC to hide their existence. This technique is called stealth. Polymorphic techniques also help viruses to infect yet avoid detection.

Note that worms often take the opposite approach and spread as fast as possible. While this makes their detection virtually certain, it also has the effect of bringing down networks and denying access; one of the goals of many worms.

Attack Phase:
Many viruses do unpleasant things such as deleting files or changing random data on your disk, simulating typos or merely slowing your PC down; some viruses do less harmful things such as playing music or creating messages or animation on your screen. Just as the infection phase can be triggered by some event, the attack phase also has its own trigger.

Does this mean a virus without an attack phase is benign? No. Most viruses have bugs in them and these bugs often cause unintended negative side effects. In addition, even if the virus is perfect, it still steals system resources. (Also, see the"good" virus discussion.)

Viruses often delay revealing their presence by launching their attack only after they have had ample opportunity to spread. This means the attack could be delayed for days, weeks, months, or even years after the initial infection.

The attack phase is optional, many viruses simply reproduce and have no trigger for an attack phase. Does this mean that these are "good" viruses? No! Anything that writes itself to your disk without your permission is stealing storage and CPU cycles. (Also see the "good" virus discussion.) This is made worse since viruses that "just infect," with no attack phase, often damage the programs or disks they infect. This is not an intentional act of the virus, but simply a result of the fact that many viruses contain extremely poor quality code.

An an example, one of the most common past viruses, Stoned, is not intentionally harmful. Unfortunately, the author did not anticipate the use of anything other than 360K floppy disks. The original virus tried to hide its own code in an area of 1.2MB diskettes that resulted in corruption of the entire diskette (this bug was fixed in later versions of the virus).

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devarajan

Virus Names:

What's in a name? When it comes to viruses it's a matter of identification to the general public. An anti-virus program does not really need the name of a virus as it identifies it by its characteristics. But, while giving a virus a name helps the public at large it also serves to confuse them since the names given to a particular beast can differ from anti-virus maker to anti-virus maker.

How? Why? Much as they would like to, the virus writers do not get to name their beasts. Some have tried by putting obvious text into the virus but most of the anti-virus companies tend to ignore such text (mostly to spite the virus writers). And, any virus writer that insists on a particular name has to identify themselves in the process--something they usually don't want to do. So, the anti-virus companies control the virus naming process. But, that leads to the naming problem.

Viruses come into various anti-virus companies around the world at various times and by various means. Each company analyzes the virus and assigns a name to it for tracking purposes. While there is cooperation between companies when new viruses are identified, that cooperation often takes a back seat to getting a product update out the door so the anti-virus company's customers are protected. This delay allows alternate names to enter the market. Over time these are often standardized or, at least, cross-referenced in listings; but that does not help when the beast makes its first appearance.

One attempt at bringing some order to the naming problem is Ian Whalley's VGrep. VGrep attempts to collect all of the various virus names and then correlates them into a single searchable list. While useful, there is, again, the lag time necessary to collect and correlate the data.

So, get used to viruses having different names. As Shakespeare said...

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet...

Another attempt is the database at VirusPool which "...tries to put information from all known infections and antivirus creators into one place so you can compare names and results." I wish them the best of luck.

A new site to try to correlate malware names: CME - Common Malware Enumeration CME provides single, common identifiers to new virus threats to reduce public confusion during malware outbreaks. CME is not an attempt to solve the challenges involved with naming schemes for viruses and other forms of malware, but instead aims to facilitate the adoption of a shared, neutral indexing capability for malware.

Summary
Virus naming is a function of the anti-virus companies. This results in different names for new viruses.
Different names can cause confusion for the public but not anti-virus software which looks at the virus, not its "name."
There are different sites that attempt to correlate the various virus names for you.

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devarajan

This is a list of notable antivirus software.

Contents

1 Proprietary
2 Freeware
3 Open source
4 Abandonware

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devarajan

The anti virus in Proprietary :

1.AhnLab V3 Internet Security
2.avast!
3.Avira
4.AVG Anti-Virus
5.BitDefender
6.BullGuard
7.Cisco Security Agent
8.Dr.Web
9.FRISK Software International
10.F-Secure
11.Kaspersky Anti-Virus
12.LinuxShield
13.McAfee VirusScan
14.NOD32
15.Norman ASA
16.Norton AntiVirus
17.Panda Security
18.PC Tools AntiVirus
19.Prevx
20.Quick Heal Antivirus
21.Rising AntiVirus
22.Sophos Anti-Virus
23.Trend Micro Internet Security
24.Vba32 AntiVirus
25.Virus Chaser
26.Windows Live OneCare
27.ZoneAlarm

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devarajan

The anti virus in Freeware :

AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic
AOL Active Virus Shield (no longer available via AOL)
AVG Anti-Virus Free
avast! Home
BitDefender Free Edition
Comodo AntiVirus
PC Tools AntiVirus

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devarajan

The list of anti virus in Open source:

1.Clam AntiVirus
2.ClamWin
3.OpenAntiVirus
4.Winpoochdavis

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devarajan

The list of anti virus in Abandonware:


1.Central Point Anti-Virus (acquired by Symantec)
2.Eliashim (now eSafe)
3.The Antidote
4.Thunder byte (now Norman)

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devarajan

Thank you so much for the list of software. I know i use Panda Security and i have had no problems as of yet. I also use Trend Micro to scan regularly, have also used prevx, but what if you use 2 or 3 different programs and stuff still gets through? Ever had that problem?

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http://www.clixsense.com/?2102998

Great collection. I think that a lot of people will be benefiting from this article. I'm using AVG since its free and you can always upgrade it on the internet everytime a new virus comes up.

you basically told about free antivirus softwares. They don't detect all the viruses. I was using them earlier but now I have paid version of mcafee total internet suite 2008. Believe me there is much difference in free and paid version!!