Your virus scanner may be useless

All of us, unless of course you have been living in a cave for the past decade, are aware of the dangers of viruses and spyware. For those of you that somehow aren't, a virus is a malicious computer program that is written to intentionally disrupt a computers normal functionality or otherwise cause harm.

Malware is created at a faster pace than ever before. It was not about 4 years ago that the known number of viruses broke the 100,000 mark. This encompasses the entire history of the virus. From the creeper virus in the early 70's all the way until 2004 100,000 viruses had been created. We are now in 2008 and the latest McAfee SuperDAT that I downloaded states that it will look for 357,714 variants of viruses, trojans, and other misc malware.

It is because of the rate that these malicious programs are being created that it is more important than ever to have an up-to-date virus scanner installed on your system. Computer programs are in no way intelligent. They can only do precisely what you tell them to. This means that while the boffins at Symantec, Trend Micro, or McAfee may have written into their definitions how to scan for win32.netsky, all it takes is someone to change the code just a little and the viruses footprint is no longer recognizable. Heuristics have made some headway, but not much. It's far too easy to mistake a perfectly legitimate program's actions as malicious, and so a lot of false alarms get thrown if they make their heuristic detection too aggressive.

The point of all of this is simple: If your virus scanner is out of date, then it's useless. Seriously, it's not going to offer you jack for protection because it won't spot the brand-new virus that was released yesterday. It doesn't know what to look for.

So, if your subscription has run out, then renew it. If you've uninstalled your old scanner, then it's time to get a new one. It only takes one little bug to wreak havoc on your hard drive and all of those photos of your trip to London are gone forever.

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Kevin Souter is a freelance computer technician that owns and operates a tech support website geared towards helping people with their computer problems. Previous to this, he owned a computer repair business in St. George, UT.