Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

How Do Viruses Attack Anti-Virus Programs, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

As the anti-viruses run in a trusted kernel level any loophole in the anti-virus program can enable attackers to take full control over the computer system and steal data or do serious damages. Hence the anti-virus engines must be developed with proper security in mind. The ant-virus should be able to any type of specially created executable files, compression packages or documents that are intentionally created to exploit the anti-virus’s weakness.

Viruses are present in almost every system even though there are anti-viruses installed. This is because every anti-virus, however good it may be, leads to some extent of false …

Protecting Anti-Virus Programs From Viral Attacks, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

During a fight between viruses and anti-viruses it is not always predictable that the anti-virus is going to win. There are many malicious viruses which target to attack and paralyze the anti-viruses. It is necessary for an anti-virus to detect and destroy the malware before its own files are detected and destroyed by the malware. The anti-virus may follow thorough testing and auditing procedures to fix all its bugs before releasing the software in the market. Besides the anti-virus may use all the obfuscation techniques like polymorphism that the viruses generally use to hide their codes. This article also shows …

Finding And Solving Contradictions Of False Positives In Virus Scanning, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

False positives are equally dangerous as false negatives. Ideally the false positive rate should remain 0 or very close to 0. Even a slightest increase in false positive rate is considered as undesirable.

Although the specific methods provide very accurate scanning by comparing viruses with their exact signatures, they fail to detect the new and unknown viruses. On the other hand the generic methods can detect even new viruses without using virus signatures. But these methods are more likely to generate false positives. There is a positive correlation between the capability to detect new and unknown viruses and false positive …