The virus detectors in various systems like, laptops, desktops, tablets, and smartphones and other electronic devices are called antivirus or anti-malware that detect, prevent and remove the viruses to provide protection to the system. Antivirus software is a program for the computer to be installed on it to protect it from various malicious programs that can destroy the data in your computer or hold your files to ransom.

The virus detector or antivirus was developed to detect and remove the viruses and protect the computer.

There is no one single, unique algorithm or formula to detect the different viruses. However, by using different layers of defense, your computer system will get a good detection rate for such malicious attacks, and your data and network will stay safe. There are several ways in which an antivirus identifies malware

Sandbox detection
This method is a particular behavioral-based detection method. Instead of detecting the fingerprint at a runtime, the program is executed in a virtual environment and logs the actions performed by the program in real time. Depending on the performed actions, the antivirus determines and detects if it is a malware virus or not.

Data mining
This is a method used in detecting malware. The algorithm for data mining or machine learning is used to classify the behavior of a malicious or benign file.

Signature-based detection
Traditional antivirus software is detected on the basis of its software signature. Once detected, the malware is analyzed by the researchers or on the basis of a dynamic analysis. Once it is identified as malware, its proper signature file is traced and added to the database of antivirus software. This is effective against malware outbreaks. The authors of such malware are way ahead by writing ‘oligomorphic’, ‘polymorphic’ and, most recently, ‘metamorphic’ viruses. These have encrypted parts and also disguise themselves so they do not match the virus signature.

Heuristics
Many viruses begin out as an individual virus which, later mutate or are refined by attackers and grow into different strains/variants. A generic detection is used to find and remove the number of threats under one single virus definition. For example, the Trojan Vundo has other members in the family called Trojan Vundo.B and Trojan Vundo. It is important to detect and identify the virus through the generic signature via a match. These signatures contain a non-contiguous code, wildlife characters, and wildcard characters with existing signatures. Wild cards for viruses detect viruses which are padded with meaningful non-contiguous code. The extra meaningless code is called a heuristic detection. Virus detectors play an important role in protecting the system from unwanted malware and spyware.

Real-time protection
Auto protect, background guard, on-access scanning, real-time protection – all these are essentially the same thing. They are auto protection offered by all antivirus, anti-malware, and anti-spyware programs. They monitor computer systems for activities like viruses, adware, spyware, and malicious objects in ‘real-time’.

Antivirus software has a privileged access to the operating system, making it a target for remote attacks. Hence, the importance of antivirus software, which has a great impact on the computer’s performance. The inexperienced users will be lulled into a false sense of security and may face problems in understanding the prompts that the antivirus software presents them. A wrong decision can lead to a security breach. The antivirus uses heuristic methods to minimize misidentify harmless software as malicious.

Antivirus software that runs on individual computers is a common method to guard against malware but is not the only solution. Other solutions used are Unified Threat Management, hardware, and network firewalls, Cloud-based antivirus and online scanners.